Macworld 2008 – MacBook Air UK Specs and Prices
The Macworld highlight, Steve’s Keynote, has been and gone. As with most keynotes, much of it was US focused. So this is the Macworld Keynote with a British Accent.
This is the first post, covering the big announcement, look for more soon.
MacBook Air
Undoubtedly the star of the show. Much of the Keynote was in imperial so, for the metricals out there this thing is less than 20mm thick at it’s thickest point. At it’s thinnest point, it’s an incomprehensible 4mm. Weight-wise, it’s 1.36Kg, which is light but still solid. It comes with all the features the other Mac laptops come with, including iSight, OSX Leopard, iLife, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth (with EDR) and top-notch Apple Design. The two major differences, apart from the size, is that the AirBook MacBook Air has no CD drive and comes with a Multi-Touch trackpad. The success, or failure, of the Multi-Touch Trackpad will depend on the exact implementation, so it’s very much wait and see. The screens are 13.3 inch backlit wonders and the battery life is quoted at around 5 hours, which is good but I was expecting more from an SSD LCD laptop.
The Base model MacBook Air, with a 1.6GHz processor and an 80Gb Hard Disk straight out of the iPod starts at £1199. The top model with a 1.8GHz processor and a 64Gb SSD (Solid State, also called Flash, with no moving parts) is going to set you back, and you may want to sit down for this, £2028. I’m guessing the extra £28, making it strangely un-rounded price, comes from the pounds current poor performance. Both are available in 2 – 3 Weeks.
MacBook Air Video Tours – Warning, this is currently loading like a pig.
MacBook Air Page
Product Page (Note: The Apple Store is currently having some issues)
It’s good to see some British Apple focus for once (why metric isn’t forced on pain of…well… pain, is a mystery) We’ve just got the MacBook Air available to order at our place and it’s looking rather sexy. (note the subtle plug 🙂 It’s probably just a matter of time before the other laptop manufacturers in the PC market start removing optical drives too, although security issues will possibly arise from purely wireless installations. But the thing that has us really excited about the MacBook Air is the shift towards solid state hard drives; providing you can shield them from unwarranted EM, they should be emerging soon across many more products. It’s really more than just a thinner MacBook – it’s a risky and admirable step where no laptop has gone before.
You are absolutely right about the SSD. It will be a brave person who puts down the considerable £640 for that option, with it’s reduced storage capacity. It’s clearly the future. I have my doubts, I’ve tried the iPod Classic, which uses the same drive as the non-SSD MacBook Air and it seems quite laggy. So the first benchmarks will be very interesting.