Fresh off its best quarter in history, Apple is pushing forward at a Lion’s pace with a slew of new products.
No optical storage, no mechanical hard drive. The new MacBook Air Ultralight Laptop Computer uses flash memory. Instant on.
Apple unveiled the all-new MacBook Air Wednesday, the first of the next generation of notebooks that will replace mechanical hard disks and optical drives with Internet services and solid-state flash storage. Available in 11-inch and 13-inch models and weighing as little as 2.3 pounds, the MacBook Air is Apple’s lightest, most mobile notebook ever. MacBook Air uses the same solid state storage technology as iPad to deliver instant-on responsiveness, up to seven hours of battery life, and up to 30 days of standby time. Starting at $999, the MacBook Air is available now on the Apple Store and at your favorite Apple Retail Store.
The $999 model sports an 11-inch diagonal display, 64GB flash storage and 2GB of memory.
Both the OS and the iLife install on a single USB drive, and the new laptop come with FaceTime Camera that is already available on iPhone and iPod Touch, which means users can make FaceTime calls over Wi-Fi with anyone who has a Mac, an iPhone 4, or the new iPod touch.
The 11.6-inch Air introduces a new processor category to its lineup, the ultra-low voltage models. It’s now using the SU9400 and SU9600, which clock in at just 1.4GHz and 1.6GHz each but use no more than 10W of power. They use an 800MHz bus but have the same 3MB of Level 2 cache as some fuller-power processors.
The laptop also includes an SD card slot.
The MacBook Air can remain in standby mode for up to 30 days.
Steve Jobs isn’t looking too healthy these days.