Early on Wednesday, during Apple's "Back to the Mac" event, Steve Jobs announced some intriguing updates to the MacBook Air family. First and foremost, the 13.3-inch model now has a younger brother in the form a of a new 11.6-inch model.
When Apple first introduced the MacBook Air, it was touted as the slimmest notebook on the planet. And though it did have its own little niche, a high asking price precluded it from really gaining a foothold amongst consumers.
Early on Wednesday, during Apple’s “Back to the Mac” event, Steve Jobs announced some intriguing updates to the MacBook Air family. First and foremost, the 13.3-inch model now has a younger brother in the form a of a new 11.6-inch model.
The new and revamped MacBook Air line takes Apple’s original design philosophy for the device and pushes it to the extreme. Now sporting a unibody construction, the new MacBook Air notebooks are just 0.68 inches thin at the thickest point and both taper down to .11 inches at the front. The larger model weighs in at 2.9 pounds while the new 11.6-inch model weighs in at a breezy 2.3 pounds.
Spec wise, the new MacBook Airs come with an LED backlit display, an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, a NVIDIAGeForce 320m graphics card, a single-button multitouch trackpad, and a full size keyboard. The larger model sports a 1440×900 display while the smaller model comes with a 1366×768 display.
Notably, the new MacBook Airs have transitioned exclusively over to flash storage. As Jobs pointed out during his presentation, one of the benefits of this is “instant on” and extremely fast boot times. In essence, the MacBook Air is defined by mostly by the features it lacks – namely an optical drive and a hard drive.
One area where Apple continues to make strides is battery life, which of course isn’t all that surprising given that Apple keeps putting larger and larger batteries in its devices. With respect to the new Airs, the 11.6-inch model has 5 hours of battery life and up to 30 days of standby time. The 13.3-inch model has up to 7 hours of battery life and 30 days of standby time as well.
Price wise, Jobs noted that Apple wanted to price the new Airs aggressively. Subsequently, the 11.6-inch model sells for $999 while the base model for the 13.3-inch Air starts at $1299. The 11.6-inch Air has a 1.4 GHz processor while the 13.3-inch Air has a 1.8 GHz processor.
You can check out an Apple produced video of the new Air below, and in case you just gotta have one ASAP, you might be glad to know that they’re already available for order on Apple’s website with an estimated shipping time of 1-2 business days.
