Thinnest MacBook Air hits market

At Apple’s Special Media Event on 10/20/2010, Jobs announced the newest version of the MacBook Air in his typical “one more thing…” fashion during the keynote. While referring to the theme “Back to the Mac”, he showed how features Apple learned and used in iPods and iPads will now be used in Macs… or as Jobs put it: “What if the MacBook and iPad hooked up?”

The features Jobs specifically talked about included instant on, great battery life, amazing standby time, solid state storage (no optical or hard drives), and more mobile (thinner and lighter).

The MacBook Air only is .68″ thin at the thickest point and tapers down to .11″ at the end of the keyboard and weighs 2.9 pounds. As usual, Apple has absolutely scored on design as the product is undeniably beautiful. There are two models, one with a 13.3″ LED Backlit Display (1440×990 pixels – more than a 15″ MacBook) and a 11.6″ LDE Backlit Display (1366×768 pixels – more than a 13″ MacBook). Both MacBook Air’s are driven by Intel Core 2 Duo processors and NVidia Geforce 320M graphics processor.

The MacBook Air’s use non-packaged flash memory similar to iPods and iPads. This means individual flash memory is attached to the motherboard and not connected via a SSD hard drive. While this helps provide instant on, great battery life, silent operation, excellent standby time and faster than standard hard drives, this also means there is no way to upgrade the “hard drive” space on your Air (without some serious soldering skills).

While the MacBook Air is sexy, I cannot justify the purchase personally considering I’d use the Air for everything I currently use the iPad for. The “other” computer I need will need to perform photo and HD video editing meaning a MacBook Pro at least. I claim that the Air cannot do these things without testing but perhaps the Air can perform the editing I need with the fast processor, nice graphics card and solid state hard drive.

Regardless, if you have an iPad, you’ll probably skip even considering an Air. On the other hand, folks that want to combine the mobility and other features of a iPad-type device with a fuller featured OS (Mac OS X), the Air makes an interesting product to check out.

MacBook Airs start at $999 for the 11.6″ x 64GB x 1.4GHz with the most expensive model at $1599 for the 13.3″ x 256GB x 1.86GHz model and is available now.