And one more thing… Steve used his classic line today to announced the new MacBook Air, a refresh of their ultrathin computer with the addition of an 11.6-inch smaller edition. But the big story is that Apple views this as a Macbook meets the iPad: ” instant-on”, smaller, and unibody. This is going to be good.
The updated design is the first major refresh in the MacBook Air’s two and half year life. The casing is now .68 at it’s thickest part and .11 at the very end. The 13-inch’s battery life is now seven hours rather than five hours on the older model even when graded on a more stringent scale. The smaller brother is five hours. Both models have a 30 day standby time.
The flash storage chip is right on the board along side an 802.11n chip, Core 2 Duo CPU, and everything else. The largest part is really the battery.
This generation of the MacBook Air does USB right with two ports, one on each side and not hidden by a silly door. There’s also a MiniDisplay port, headphone jack and SD card slot on the new models.
The 11.6-inch model starts out at $999 with the 13.3-inch hitting at $1299, which is just about right considering the computer hardware is actually a few generations old. There isn’t anything in there that would be considered top-tier or next-gen — well, besides the size of course.