MacWorld 2008: MacBook Air Announced

As speculated here and everywhere else, Steve Jobs has officially unveiled the MacBook Air subnotebook at his MacWorld 2008 keynote about 30 minutes ago. The Air will mark Apple’s return to the small form factor notebook market, which they last delved into with the popular iBook. And this thing is small! Weighing in at just 3lbs, at its thinnest width the Air is just 0.16″ and 0.76″ at its thickest height. The 13.3″ backlit LED display is said to rival the vanilla MacBook and as you can see from the photos it is unbelievably sexy and saliva worthy.

One of the first things you will notice about the Air is the large multi function trackpad. So most of the cool features and gestures we are used to in our iPhone/touch will now be standard on the MacBook Air. Finally some mousing progress.

The Air comes with a 60% shrunken Core 2 Duo Intel CPU with 1.6Ghz and 1.8Ghz options available. The generous 2GB of stock memory looks to be soldered onto the mainboard (which is damn small!). As with the MacBook line the new Air will use a Intel GMA X3100 graphics processor with 144MB of DDR2 SDRAM shared with main memory for video.

The pundits were also right in predicting that Apple would unveil flash memory based SSD hard drives with the new notebook. I thought it was kind of strange that users would have the option between a 1.8″ 80GB hard drive vs a 64GB SSD based drive, but there you have it. Like Steve says the flash memory based drives are ‘really quick‘. Sadly as we expected the SSD option is hella expensive too - A MacBook Air with 64GB SSD drive and 1.8Ghz CPU is $3,098.00 compared to $1799.00 for the 80GB 4200-rpm PATA drive and 1.6Ghz CPU. Alone it’s a wallet punishing $999 upgrade. I am guessing this will get people talking.

The Air also comes equipped with an 802.11n wifi card, Bluetooth 2.1/EDR, 1 USB 2.0 port (wow not 2?), Micro-DVI, Audio Out, an iSight, and a 45 Watt MagSafe which will give you around 5 hours of battery life. I think it’s pretty sweet the way Apple has hid the ports on this new Mac (which was also predicted).

The MacBook Air is priced between $1799 - $3,098 and will be available in 2 weeks (pre-ordering available). For all the info you need on the new MacBook Air including some great videos, check out the official MacBook air page at Apple. Gizmodo also has a really thorough hands-on with LOTS of photos.