And the race is back on in Sub-Notebook World. Steve Jobs unveiled a beauty that maxes out at less than 2 cm thick and 3 lb in weight … once again demonstrating that in one fell swoop, he is capable of both topping himself in product-launch style points — Who else would unveil the Next Cool Thing by using a manila envelope? — and resurrecting the inferiority complexes of technophiles everywhere, whose 2.75-cm, 5-lb “classic” MacBooks now feel like glorified paperweights (myself included).
Specs include an 80 GB hard drive with the option of a 64 GB solid-state drive upgrade, 13.3″ widescreen with LED backlighting, anodized aluminum casing, backlit keyboard, ambient light sensor, and multi-touch trackpad a la iPhone. It’s also supposed to turn on instantly upon opening, eliminating any boot time. Altogether priced at $1,799 starting. A beautiful machine, surely, though the Intel Core 2 Duo chip is a 1.6 GHz, upgradeable to a 1.8 GHz — kind of a step down from the 2.2 to 2.6’s available on the previous MBs and MB Pros.
Emphasis is on “Air” — the lack of an optical drive means a heavy reliance on wirelessness. Hence the other big announcement, streaming movie rentals. Again, as I previously mentioned, not so hot on that one. Interesting, though, that the proposed solution to having no CD/DVD access is to install software on a neighboring computer that allows the neighbor to wirelessly communicate data to the MB Air. I wonder if this means you can load a DVD into said neighbor and then beam the entire movie onto your tiny-Mac.
Thoughts of this wanna-be techno-geek: Despite any perceivable flaws on paper, I’m a man and they say men are visually oriented. MBA is just too sexy; I have a feeling Jobs could’ve fucked up the innards of this computer and still sold me based solely on outer looks.
Drool … need to make field trip to Apple Store.
