The MacBook Air Ad

There's Something In The Air

In 2007 last year, Apple unveiled the iPhone and rocked the world. The year 2007 was declared the year of the iPhone and Time Magazine called it the technology of the year. So what's in store for 2008?

Yesterday at Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco, Apple unveiled its latest product, the MacBook Air, and according to Steve Jobs, it is the world's thinnest notebook. The MacBook Air measures 0.16-inches at its thinnest point, while its maximum height of 0.76-inches is less than the thinnest point on competing notebooks on the market.



The MacBook Air has a stunning 13.3-inch LED-backlit widescreen display, a full-size and backlit keyboard, a built-in iSight video camera for video conferencing, and a spacious trackpad with multi-touch gesture support (similar to the iPhone's multi-touch) so users can pinch, rotate and swipe.

The MacBook Air is powered by a 1.6 GHz or 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor with MB L2 cache, and includes as a standard features 2GB of memory, an 80GB 1.8-inch hard drive, and the latest 802.11n Wi-Fi technology and Bluetooth 2.1. This ultra-portable notebook is designed to be fully 'wireless', so the optical drive isn't included.

Now this is how ultra-portable should be. Rather than sacrificing a full-size keyboard or a full-size 13-inch screen, you could still get the slimmest and lightest notebook to lug around. This is a high-performance notebook without compromising all that. The MacBook Air is so thin that Steve Jobs pulled the laptop out of a manila envelope during his keynote!

Solid State Drives For All

Nowadays, there are a few computer hardware manufacturers that are slowly introducing new storage disks medium for PCs and ultra-portable laptops that could replace conventional hard disks we are using for many years. They're called Solid State Drives, or SSD for short, and they will soon overshadow the dominance of Hard Disk Drives (HDD) due to their advantages.

Solid State Drives use non-volatile flash memory to store data, rather than a hard disk drive mechanism. As a result, there's no spinning motor, which means that performance is better and battery power consumption is less. SSDs produce less heat and have lower weight than hard drives. Best of all, they're highly impact-resistant so there's no way of getting your data crashed if you accidently (or carelessly) dropped your notebook.
The only downside is that SSD capacities hold only a fraction of the amount of data that hard drives can hold. For now, that is. Expect the sizes to be bigger in the not-so-distant future. Hopefully the next gen iPods use SSD for storage, so then we won't have to worry about iCrashes.