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MacBook Air Updated, Now in Small (13.3 inch) and Extra Small (11.6-inch)

by Terrence O'Brien on October 20, 2010 at 02:55 PM

macbook air
When Apple said "back to the Mac," it really meant "back to the MacBook Air." The company's tiny, ultra-portable machine got a refresh today that added the buttonless multitouch trackpad already found on the rest of the MacBook line and a second USB port that is a very welcome addition for users who like to plug more than one device into their computer at a time. Otherwise, the internals are largely the same, and perhaps getting a little long in the tooth. The newer Core i3s and i5s apparently wouldn't fit in the Air chassis, and Apple didn't want to downgrade to an Atom. (Why make a netbook when you have the iPad?) So, the Core 2 Duo is sticking around for another generation of MacBook Airs. The hard drive has been replaced with flash storage (still no optical drive, either) to provide not just faster operation, but instant start-up capabilities and significantly longer battery life: seven hours surfing on Wi-Fi, and 30 days of standby.

Apple has moved its 13.3-inch Air to a thinner and lighter unibody construction, but the real excitement is around the Air's so-called "little brother," an 11.6-inch model that packs the same flash storage, NVIDIA graphics and 2GB of RAM as its full-sized sibling. The smaller model tips the scales at a barely-there 2.9-pounds, entering the realm of high-end netbooks. It features a slightly lower-resolution screen, 1.4 GHz processor (compared to the 13-incher's 1.86 GHz), and shorter battery life (only five hours on Wi-Fi) -- but it has a lower price to match.

MacBook Air



The new MacBook Airs will be available later today. The 11.6-inch version will have two models, both sporting 1.4Ghz Core 2 Duo processors. The version packing 64GB of SSD storage is reasonably priced (for Apple) at $999, while jumping to 128GB of storage pushes the cost to $1,199. That option is slightly less compelling when you realize that only $100 more ($1,299) buys you the baseline 13.3-inch model with 128GB of flash, a faster processor and longer battery life. You can bump the storage on the 13.3-incher up to 256GB for $1,599.

The one thing missing to complete this meeting of the iPad and MacBook, as Jobs was calling it, is a touchscreen. But we can't be greedy, now can we?

Tags: apple, laptops, mac, macbook, macbook air, MacbookAir, top

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