Apple MacBook Air
Apple hosted a media event on their campus to unveil the new MacBook Air models. Those in attendance had the opportunity to spend some time with the new models. Both devices are incredibly thin and light, but the 11.6″ version stole the show. Even though small, they have a full keyboard and a nearly full-sized trackpad.
Boot time is an amazing 15 seconds or less. According to an Apple support document, the 30-day standby battery life for the new MacBook Airs is accomplished with a new mode that activates after an hour of regular sleep, saving the entire system state to flash memory and turning off hardware systems.
The move to exclusive solid state storage in a laptop is a great improvement, but some compromises had to be made to keep cost and power consumption down.
For example, Apple computer used the same 1.86Ghz Core 2 Duo as the previous model instead of moving up to Intel’s Core i3 Mobile processor, which, although it gives better performance, also requires far more power to operate.
All in all, though, the Air’s are quite impressive for their size and cost.
