New super thin notebook comes with 64GB SSD, multitouch, and amazingly it doesn’t cost the earth.
Apple confirmed weeks of speculation today when it introduced a new ultra-thin notebook at the Macworld Expo.
Dubbed the Macbook Air, the new laptop is under three quarters of an inch thick and features a 13.3 inch screen along with a full-screen keyboard. Australian pricing will be $2499 when the notebook ships in February.
Apple co-founder and chief executive Steve Jobs demonstrated just how thin the new notebook was by pulling it out for its grand introduction from a standard envelope.
Small size aside, the Macbook Air sports a number of standard notebook features, including Bluetooth, 802.11n wifi and a 1.6ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. All of the ports are protected by a fold-down door on the site of the device.
Users will have the option of either an 80GB hard-disk drive or a 64GB solid-state drive at an additional cost. Jobs said that battery time would be roughly 5 hours.
The track pad on the new notebook will include multi-touch capabilities similar to the iPhone's touch screen. Users can scroll through the screen, zoom in on objects, and rotate photos.
One standard feature will be absent from the Macbook Air, however. Apple will ship the notebook without an optical disk drive as standard. Jobs told the crowd that he doesn't see the omission as a big deal.
"We don't think most users are going to miss the optical drive," he said, noting that an external Superdisk drive will be available for $99.
Users will also have the option of 'borrowing' CD and DVD drives from nearby computers via special software included with the notebook.
All of the Macbook Air's motherboard, storage, and cooling systems fit on a single board roughly the length of a pencil. To fit into the laptop, Intel had to shrink its processor to the size of roughly a one dollar coin.
"When we started this project, we didn't think it was possible," said Intel chief executive Paul Otellini.
As opposed to last year's iPhone rollout, Mac users will not have to wait very long to get their hands on the hardware. Apple plans to ship the notebook in two weeks and is currently accepting pre-orders.