An Apple Wednesday, For An Apple Tomorrow

Apple unveiled a new Macbook Air today along with a few smaller tidbits of news. What do you need to know? And is this new Air worth all those pennies?

Let’s start with the hardware. First you’ll notice the two flavors of which are 11.6in and 13.3in screen sizes. The width and depth are obviously different, but the important thing to notice is the height being only 0.68 inches at the highest point and only 0.11 at the lowest. That is in fact the same on both sizes. The weight however is slightly different at 2.3lbs and 2.9lbs respectively. These are in fact a small light laptop and not a bad size for a netbook or low power laptop, but let’s take a look under the hood.

The processor is a Intel Core 2 Duo running at 1.4GHz or 1.6GHz on the 11.6in model and 1.86GHz or 2.13GHz on the 13.3in model. Just that alone tells me the 11.6in model is a good unit for a netbook style computer for surfing the web and minor applications. While the 13.3in model with the more powerful options are well suited for multimedia and office type tasks. Still the Core 2 Duo is an older Intel chipset and I’m surprised Apple didn’t go for the newer Core i5 chips. Nevertheless, the Core 2 Duo is actually slightly better than the Core i3 chips and quite an improvement over the Atom chip.

Well, what about memory or ram? The will ship with an adequate 2GB of ram and can support upto 4GB. This is luckily the faster DDR3 memory. 2GB is enough for most users, but your better off with 4GB. Granted Apple will charge you $100 just for the extra 2GB.
And Hard Drive space will be all solid state with 64GB or 128GB options on the 11.6in and 128GB and 256GB on the 13.3in. That’s not bad for the intended light use of these models. Still the drawback of the price tag on solid state drives almost eliminates the benefit.

Graphics are important and Apple knows this. They threw in a Nvidia 320M GPU with 256MB dedicated memory. This is good, I would prefer ATI/AMD graphics, but this is good. Now we can at least play a few games.

The screens are LED and that’s nice for power consumption. The body design is the Aluminum Unibody Design that makes it almost impossible to service yourself. An average of 5-7 hours of battery life is quite good. Wireless N and Bluetooth are nice, I’m sure Apple wouldn’t consider leaving them out. But if you don’t use Bluetooth, turn it off. And of course you’ll get a full size keyboard and a Multi-Gesture Trackpad. You’ll also find 2 USB ports and a SD card reader (13.3in model only). The standard Magsafe power adapter and a mini display port. And don’t forget the Facetime camera, also known as a webcam.

Starting at $949 and going on up over $1800 with all the options, even as a mac user, you can do much better with a Windows based lightweight notebook. Like the HP DM4 series that I’m using to write this article. It ran me around $1600 but with a Intel Core i7, 8GB ram, DVD burner and 500GB hard drive all in a 14in body! Whew, I’ve got better battery life too.

In other Apple news they announced iLife ‘11 at only $49 to upgrade and with numerous improvements that I can call it a smart buy for any Apple user. And we also got a sneak peak at Apple OS X Lion. So far I am not impressed, but that may change once we get to peak under the hood! The biggest so called news for Lion is that it will get an App Store and Mission Control to easily see what’s running.

So save some money this time around. The New Macbook Air is a nice lightweight laptop, but you can get better for a lower cost. And Windows 7 and OS X Tiger are too close to call shots these days. iLife ‘11 is a smart buy and we will have to wait and see what the Lion brings. By the way, did Apple run out of Big Cat’s names? Lion almost seems to easy. LOL.