Tuesday brought Macworld, the giant expo for all things Apple. Steve Jobs announced new firmware updates for iPhone and AppleTV, told us we could all spend $20 to get applications for iPod Touch that have been available on iPhone since the beginning and generally disappointed the crowd with most of what he had to say.
That is, until he introduced the MacBook Air.
This little beauty weighs in at three pounds exactly, has a 13.3-inch screen and is .16 inch thick at the narrow end, tapering to .76 inch at the "fat" end, if you can call it that. It packs a 1.6 or 1.8 gigahertz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2 gigabytes of memory and your choice of an 80 GB traditional hard drive or a 64 GB solid state drive (which, having no moving parts, uses less energy and runs faster and more quietly).
Seeing as there’s really no room for too many useful ports, they left out the Ethernet jack, opting instead to use Wi-Fi (802.11n, no less) only. You can purchase a USB-to-Ethernet adapter, but for the same $29 you can also buy a used wireless router.
It does have Bluetooth 2.0, so your phone (which is way thicker than this thing could ever be) can connect wirelessly. No word yet on whether you can use your phone as a modem over Bluetooth, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
Apple did, however, see fit to include a foldout panel with a single USB port, a Micro-DVI port (with an adapter or two for any displays you may have – up to 24 inches), a Video Graphics Array, S-Video and composite video out (all via adapters again – these, however, aren’t included).
Again, because of lack of space, there is the option of an external SuperDrive or none at all.
The full-size lit keyboard is nice, and the integrated iSight camera is thoughtful, but why would anyone pay the Apple tax on such commonplace specs? Sure it’s tiny, but so is my Asus Eee PC.
The real draw here is Apple’s trademark multi-touch mousepad. Though the screen isn’t touch sensitive, the mousepad will react to more than one finger just like iPhone will. Furthermore, OS X Tiger has been optimized for the multi-touch pad (at least for the MacBook Air – I’ve no idea if Tiger includes touch capabilities on other systems) so your screen looks sweet and the mousepad continues the joy all the way to your loving hands.
The five-hour battery (measured while browsing wirelessly) is all well and good, but it’s sealed inside the case, making it impossible for you to replace it without voiding the warranty, just like with iPod and iPhone. Yes, Apple will charge you $129 for a new one, and yes, you have to send it away for the work to be done, but hey, at least they aren’t charging installation, right?
On the low end, expect to pay $1,799 and up to $3,098 for the high-end model.
Jobs also released the Apple Time Capsule, a network-attached storage device with 500 GB or 1 terabyte of space – plenty for lots of high-definition video rentals (4 GB each) on Apple TV. It also features an 802.11n wireless router built in, so you’re always close to your files and can stream those glorious videos wirelessly throughout the house.
Oddly, Jobs didn’t have anything to say for his famous "one more thing" at the end of the keynote – then again, I suppose you can’t release something on the scale of iPhone every year.
