The big announcement at yesterday’s MacWorld came in the form of the thinnest laptop ever produced - the MacBook Air. Weighing only three pounds and less than an inch thick, this bad boy will be perfect for an on-the-go blogger(are you reading this, Steve Jobs?) Some more pictures and tech specs after the jump!

As news of the new laptop broke, I was expecting at least some degree of compromise with the display, but a 13.3 inch display with a 1280×800 resolution is nothing to scoff at. So clearly, there must be some sacrifice in storage capacity…an 80 gig hard drive, with an option for a 64 gig solid state drive seem to say otherwise. There’s 2 gigs of RAM and a custom built 1.6 GHz or 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 processor as well, so that’s not it either. Something has to give!

Two things actually, if you ask me. First, there is only one USB port. Now obviously this isn’t that much of a problem, but when you couple it with the second issue, you’ll begin to see why the MacBook Air is a little…erm…light on performance. There is no optic drive! No optic drive!? What does that even mean? Glad you asked. Optic drives are responsible for reading or burning CDs and DVDs. You know…those ancient pieces of technology needed to install programs or enjoy pretty much any form of media. Now, being the kind hearted folks that they are, Apple offers two ways you can solve this problem by a) purchasing an external Superdrive (which plugs into that lone USB port you have) for 100 bucks that effectively negates the space you save on the laptop or b) wirelessly access the optic drive of another computer, provided there’s one around. A first world problem to be sure, but one I would think the forward thinkers at Apple would have solved better.

All in all, the MacBook Air is a promising first step towards a high performance and low maintenance laptop. Preorders for the $1799 machine are being taken now with an expected ship date in about two weeks.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 11:12 pm and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.