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Apple Announces MacBook Air

Posted by kdawson on from the thin-end-of-the-wedge dept.

Apple made four announcements at MacWorld Expo: the new MacBook Air, new features for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and movie rentals via iTunes from a TV without a computer involved. The new portable gets most of the attention. It is 0.76" thick at the thickest part, tapering to 0.16". It weighs 3 pounds and has a 13.3" screen and full-size, backlit keyboard. Its Intel chip is the diameter of a dime and the thickness of a nickel. The MacBook Air will cost $1799 and up. Its storage is either 80 GB disk or 64 GB solid-state drive. 2 GB of memory. It has no optical drive (an external one is available for $99) and features a way to wirelessly use the optical drive of any nearby Mac or PC with the proper software installed.

2 of 1,218 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Solid state drive? by norminator · · Score: 1, Troll

    Seriously, they have no moving parts - which do you think will fail first? The manufacturers have been working on the limited write capacity for years such that they believe it's no longer an issue. Modern flash memory can already silently correct for any parts that can no longer be written.
    Not to mention that the big killer for flash memory is swap files. Your normal day-to-day operations aren't going to be doing so much disk writing that it's really going to be an issue for a long time. If you're swapping files to disk all the time, though, you might run into problems. I noticed they said that the Air comes with a minimum of 2GB of RAM, so that probably helps reduce the need for swapping.

    I really thought it was funny back when all the flash-based mp3 players were coming out, and people would make comments about the limited number of write cycles... Even without wear-leveling, 100,000 write cycles is a lot for a music player. The pins on the dock connector would break before you reach that many rewrites.

    And for general day-to-day computing, with wear-leveling and a healthy amount of RAM, I would think that Flash would be a pretty viable option.
  2. I give it a 3 out of 5 by Alzheimers · · Score: 1, Troll

    At first I was dazzled by the bullshit, but after an hour's contemplation I realized that nothing they've announced today is either revolutionary or exciting.

    #1 - The Time Capsule. Haven't we had wireless NAS's since 802.11 became a standard? I've got a USB-2 external drive that does my backups now. This announcement does absolutely nothing for me.

    #2 - The iPhone/iPod touch updates. I was really hoping to hear an announcement regarding the hardware. More memory. Smaller form factor. Lower price. Open network. Instead we see a few lousy software upgrades (woo, quasi-GPS that's been in the system for a week now). And, a nice F-U to the early adopters in a 20$ upgrade for the Touch. Glad noone bought me one of those for xmas. Anyone who did get one in the last 30 days should immediately return it and get one of the "new" ones with the additional features for free. And take a crap in the box, before they do.

    #3 - The AppleTV/Movie Rental Service. Exciting, if the XBox360 hasn't been serving this capacity for over TWO YEARS. Wow, all the major labels, eh? Are they suddenly going to cut ties with all their other distribution partners? I didn't think so. And the price cut on the AppleTV was okay, but they *really* couldn't go just a bit further to put it below the $200 mark? Really, they must want this device to fail.

    #4 - The MacBook Air. It's really just a masturbation toy for the rich gadget hound -- it does nothing new besides be smaller, and it does it slower and more expensively to boot. Wow, it fits in an envelope. Unless you're mailing me one, I'm not interested. Multitouch pad? Give it a month, they'll be on all the MacBooks. The size factor will very quickly be copied by Sony/Dell/et al, so Windows fanbois can rest easy. What would have made it revolutionary? If it were JUST a screen, no Keyboard, no fancy touchpad. Or, if it were under a thousand dollars. THAT would have been impressive. Made of Aluminum? And you thought the last generation MacBooks broke easily! Remote Disk? I've been sharing my CD-ROM drive via windows networking since 1996. It even works over wireless!

    What WOULD have been impressive:
    - A new headless Mac Desktop that fits between the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro.
    - An iPhone Nano, about the size of the old iPod Nano with 1-2gb of memory for $99-$149.
    - A Mac tablet running full Leopard with multitouch. Bonus points if it's under $1500.
    - An iMac with a curved monitor like what's been shown at CES.
    - Price drops on the iPhone, iPod Touch, or Mac Mini.

    In a word: meh.