Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 16 January 2008 01:26
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
There were widespread predictions of a lightweight notebook announcement at Macworld Expo, but did anybody say it was going to be this slim?
The MacBook Air measures just 0.76in/1.94cm near the hinge, tapering to 0.16in/0.4cm at the thinnest point. That makes it the world's slimmest notebook according to Apple.
In terms of features, just about everything you expect from a Mac is there with the exception of an optical drive. With those dimensions, something's got to give, but at least the optional $US99/$A139 MacBook Air SuperDrive is USB powered, so if you do need to take it on the road there's no messing with additional power adaptors.
However, there's only one USB port on the MacBook Air, so if you plan to use more than one peripheral you will need to be prepared for a lot of plugging and unplugging, or to carry a hub. Along with the headphone jack and micro-DVI port, the USB connector is mounted in a small flip-down unit on the right side of the computer.
Before we leave the topic of storage, the 80G hard drive or optional 64G flash drive are on the small side. 320G and even 500G notebook drives are offered by major disk vendors, but the MacBook Air uses a 1.8in drive - the sort previously associated with iPods and other portable media players. Still, Apple's sold a lot of low-end MacBooks, which also start with (admittedly faster) 80G drives.
As expected, the 13.3in, 1280x800 pixel widescreen display uses LED backlighting. This technology consumes less power than traditional fluorescent lighting, and contains no mercury.
That size screen means there's room for a full-size keyboard, and Apple has kept the automatic keyboard illumination originally found on late model Powerbooks and more recently on the MacBook Pro.
The large trackpad incorporates iPhone-style multi-touch technology to support a variety of gestures. Pinch (moving the finger and thumb together or apart) controls zooming in some applications including Safari and iPhoto, swipe (a three-finger drag) is the equivalent of forward and back commands, and the extremely intuitive rotate (rotating finger and thumb) rotates images in iPhoto. What's not clear at this stage is whether the trackpad software requires specific support in applications, or whether it can be configured to generate keystrokes that correspond to various applications' commands.
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