
Apple releases 11.6" Instant-On MacBook Air for $999 - vlad
http://www.apple.com/macbookair/
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whalesalad
I love the little dongle that it comes with as a "software reinstall" --
<http://i.imgur.com/Hj8zt.png>

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jcromartie
Looks like USB without the box around the contacts.

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seldo
But with rounded contacts! You know somewhere they had a meeting about how
rectangular contacts would be off-brand.

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sama
I've had a MacBook Air since the day it originally came out, and it's been my
favorite computer ever. This addresses all of my issues with it. As long as
you don't need extreme computing power, you should get one. It's one of those
cases where being twice as portable makes it ten times as useful.

~~~
katovatzschyn
I tried MacBook Air and Envy 133 earlier, but I change to Thinkpad X301 and
must say that other than very great OSX (use Linux so does not matter so much)
I prefer Thinkpad now.

~~~
slantyyz
The one thing that I dislike about the latest small form factor ThinkPads is
the USB docking stations. The older Thinkpads had one of those bottom mount
docking stations.

Mac users might dismiss docking stations, but they are --so-- handy if you're
constantly moving around.

~~~
drats
My x200 12" appears to have the docking port on the bottom.

~~~
slantyyz
Interesting.

IIRC, the X301 dropped the bottom dock connector. One guy I know spent hours
with support trying to get the USB dock to work. He ended up not using the
dock. The dock on his previous X-series worked like a charm.

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ivanzhao
I have owned 3 Macbook Airs. Two first-gen ones broke down too often, the
second-gen one Apple gave to me for free.

Most people complained it's pricey. It puzzles me. Think of how many hours a
day you spent touching it. A $2000 price-tag divided by 2 years, 10 hours a
day, that's cheaper than your daily beer habit.

It is absolutely worth it to buy the best machine you can afford.

~~~
drats
It's not the best machine you can afford though for a lot of people. I have a
X200 thinkpad at 12" which is 600 grams more than the 11" and 300 grams more
than the 13". But it has a dual core i5 at 2.5 gigahertz which is a fair bit
faster than low clocked cpus of a generation that was released in 2006, 4 gigs
of ram (rather than 2) and an Intel 80gig SSD running Ubuntu 10.10. The
battery is 7 to 11 hours. With their batteries in it it'd be even lighter than
it is, most of the difference is right there. It already has an app store with
nearly a 100/0 free/paid split (I think I've heard there are paid apps in
there somewhere). It cost $1150 or so with the SSD as an extra $200 (but I
have a 500gig external drive now too). It's the classic very attractive "they
use these on the space station" thinkpad case, well designed with water-spill
catching design et cetera.

So yes, the macbook is a good machine. But for people who aren't developing
for OSX and still want well designed hardware it's hard to argue there aren't
other options that are easily better if you can handle 300 grams of extra
weight. And yes, I've had macbooks fail on me (case cracking and hdd failure
within one year) so I think they are probably average quality in that regard
(i.e. the internals don't match their good looks and are possibly compromised
by them sometimes).

~~~
wtallis
The MacBook Air's Geforce 320M is a significantly better GPU than anything
Intel has shipped.

~~~
drats
Ah ok. My usage is business and development so I suppose the cpu matters much
more to me, as do open source reliable drivers. I see the point for a fast GPU
for entertainment usage, but going all the way down to a 1.4 gighz core 2 duo
seems like it would cancel out a lot of the gaming potential that the GPU
gains.

~~~
wtallis
Gaming's not the only advantage that a Geforce chip has over Intel's graphics,
since the NVidia chip supports GPGPU. Used properly, OpenCL could make up for
the slow CPU for things like Photoshop effects and video editing. It's a
tradeoff that's highly dependent on what kind of software you want to run.

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icegreentea
Sub 13" != netbook Remember, we had sub 13" laptops (we called them sub
notebooks or ultraportables or something) before netbooks came out. Recall the
confusion when netbooks first came out. In fact, the original netbooks weren't
even close to 11.6" large. 11.6/12" was solely the domain of subnotebooks
until the ~3rd generation of netbooks (amazing how quickly they pumped those
out).

So stop comparing this to netbooks. Compare them to Thinkpad X series and
other non-Atom powered sub 13" laptops. Hell, compare it to the Alienware M11z
if you want. Even that's a more accurate comparison than netbooks.

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gamble
My MBP is already 'instant-on'. Open the case and one second later it's awake
and ready to go. I'll never understand why people feel the need to shut down
their computer after every use.

~~~
siglesias
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but this _is_ what Steve is referring to. 30
days of standby effectively makes awake from sleep the same as on, whereas
before you had a fast drain during even sleep.

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gamble
The '30 days of standby' figure assumes that you let your Air go into
hibernation, which has been supported by MacBooks for a long time, but only as
a last resort when the battery gets low. The Air is apparently just more
aggressive about using hibernation.

The underlying power management architecture (top-notch, admittedly) hasn't
changed at all. Hibernation isn't any faster to restore than other MacBooks
with a SSD. They've just made wake-from-sleep slightly faster on the new Air.
Nice to have, but it doesn't seem as significant to me as Steve made it sound.

~~~
ericd
Are you sure about this? Hibernation generally refers to writing the contents
of RAM to disk so that the computer can power off completely, if I'm not
mistaken.

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gamble
That's what Engadget is saying is necessary to hit the 30 days. It's still
early and no one has had time to do a thorough review, but I don't get the
impression that there's anything fundamentally different about the new Air's
power management. They've just tightened up the response time and made the SSD
standard, so hibernation is much faster.

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achompas
Too many people are calling this thing overpriced, but remember that a 64GB
iPad is $699. Then, in addition, you're getting a full OS, a stronger
processor, a dedicated graphics chip, and this last one's dumb, but you're
getting a keyboard too.

So I think pricing is spot-on for the 11" specs. If I replace my primary
machine (a first-gen Macbook) with this, though, it would need to be the 13".
The 11" seems like a secondary machine.

One question, though: isn't instant start-up trivial for a laptop?

~~~
steveklabnik
> One question, though: isn't instant start-up trivial for a laptop?

Only when it's sleeping, not when it's hibernating. This would be "shut my Mac
for two days, come back to instant-on."

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jncraton
The $999 model seems to come equipped with a 1.4 Ghz Core 2 Duo. Any ideas why
they didn't use the newer i series CPUs? Don't they have better performance
per watt?

~~~
adolph
This is kind of interesting to me as an owner of a couple older Minis: is
Apple signalling that 10.7 will run fine on a lower end Core 2 Duo?

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wtallis
I would be shocked if 10.7's CPU requirements were anything more stringent
than a 64-bit capable CPU (ie. Core 2 or later). There's a chance that they
might drop support for low-end GPUs like then Intel GMA950, but it seems too
soon for them to require an OpenCL-capable GPU, so they'll probably keep Intel
graphics support around until they're ready to make that jump.

~~~
adolph
Yeah, 64bit and the graphics card will probably become more important. I was
wondering why they went with the Nvidia card (which probably precluded using a
Core i-series processor instead of the Core 2 Duo), but given the OpenCL
emphasis, it makes sense. Hopefully Apple will allow some performance
optimizations, like how they disabled the water-ripple effect of Dashboard on
non-OpenGL video card computers when that came out.

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iamelgringo
So, the apple version of my netbook costs $1k. Wow. Apple makes gorgeous,
intuitive products, but... Wow.

I bought an Asus Aspire 1. I put in 2GB of RAM($40), Installed a OCZ SSD
($160), and bought a 9 cell battery for it($55), and put Windows 7 Ultimate on
it (TRIM support for SSD's and free with a BizSpark subscription).

I now have a machine a bit thicker than an iPad that runs a full version of
Windows 7 Ultimate, has a 14 hour battery life, and an extra battery with 10
hours on it. It's "Instant On" because I never turn it off, it just
hibernates, and the SSD I'm using is crazy fast and sips battery juice through
a cocktail straw. All for a bit more than $500.

Oh, did I mention that I can replace the memory, battery and Hard Drive
without voiding my warranty?

I understand the appeal of a MacBook Air. I do. But the appeal of beautiful
design, a glowing logo rules telling me to keep my hands off my own
hardware... It's just not work the extra $500 for me.

~~~
rimantas
Why the price of Windows was not in calculation? Did you also get aluminum
unibody, full-size backlit keyboard, camera, multitouch trackpad? By the way,
I am curious is Windows wake from sleep as instant as it is on OS X?

~~~
richbradshaw
When you go back to using non Apple hardware the keyboard and touchpads are
generally very bad. Bearing in mind the time spent using the keyboard and
mouse having a good one makes the difference.

~~~
slantyyz
Even more important, the screens. Apples have historically had very good
screens.

I look back at one of my older Windows laptops, which had exquisite res
(1680x1050) and maybe cost me $1600. When I compare it to any of my Apple
devices (even the low end ones), the screen is so horrible that I don't even
know how I was able to work on it day in, day out.

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malandrew
The only concern I see is pixel density. This is great for people like me with
great eyesight, but I know my dad hates using my MacBook Pro 17" because I
have the higher resolution screen option with greater pixel density.

OS X needs to support pixel density independency for these screens to be
usable for those with less than perfect eyesight.

~~~
slantyyz
I was expecting resolution independence to be part of today's announcement. No
dice.

~~~
malandrew
Resolution independence really is going to become a necessary feature in the
next year or so, especially given the pixel density on the iPhone 4.

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gbrindisi
I'd like a little notebook like this new Macbook Air, it would fits my needs
for a thin portable client to replace my actual macbook (I ssh a lot to remote
workstation when I need horsepower, coding and so on).

Still something puzzles me:

* No Ethernet. I really can't trust Airport, i have a 13" Macbook and sometimes Airport fails hard (without mentioning the speed transfer).

* No upgradable. I understand the design choices behind this nice netbook (or whatever), but what if the ssd breaks? Or the ram? I'd need to buy a new one.

Maybe my needs would be better fitted by a standard netbook. The truth I am
ashamed to confess is that I am _too_ confortable with OSX.

~~~
slantyyz
I think people should definitely invest a few extra bucks on Applecare with
this model.

~~~
gbrindisi
Absolutely but... hell it's +250 bucks!

~~~
slantyyz
Spread that cost over 3 years, and it's not that expensive. If you're buying a
notebook that you intend to use for work or move around constantly, you have
to budget that cost in.

Even if I was buying a Thinkpad X series for work, I'd invest in the extended
warranty.

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derefr
Now they need to just _un-_ taper it, and fill the resulting space completely
with battery. 40hr battery life MacBook.

~~~
malandrew
Interesting idea. They certainly could stick a lot more battery in there if
they un-tapered it.

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sigzero
The taper gets your typing angle right (I am guessing).

~~~
malandrew
Good point. However, I don't recall Steve or any text on the Apple website
that outright says that it is tapered for economics reasons. In this Stevenote
and the previous Stevenotes where the MacBook Air was discussed it came across
as if the the taper was there so they have another number to brag about when
talking about thinness. That was my impression at least.

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adolph
Wow, an official Mac OS X reinstall USB key:

[http://images.apple.com/macbookair/images/specs_flashdrive_2...](http://images.apple.com/macbookair/images/specs_flashdrive_20101020.jpg)

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yatsyk
hdd versions discontinued... future is here

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mrchess
one of the first things i noticed too. 2 years ago it was $1600 for an 80gb
macbook air. time flies.

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unexpected
Arg! Apple, when are you going to add the i5 to your 13" MacBook Pro for me?

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wmf
When the i5 has a decent GPU.

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Sindisil
Looks very nice, but two things keep it from being a contender for my next
portable purchase:

1\. Glossy screen. That's a show-stopper. The whole point of a portable for me
is that it is usable wherever I am, not that I can take it to where it might
be usable.

2\. Price. $999 is not _that_ bad for what you get, but it pales in absolute
terms to current netbook prices. And said netbooks _are_ available with matte
screens. They also usually have 3 USB ports (though I seldom use more than 2).

Still and all, very nice.

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ojbyrne
Kind of pissed that if I want the 2.13 ghz processor, I have to buy the 256 gb
storage version. Otherwise I'd have already ordered.

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slantyyz
I'm kinda curious. Does anyone know if that extra .27 ghz translate to a big
difference in real world use?

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ojbyrne
I get your point, its just I want the fastest processor. But not with the
biggest storage.

~~~
slantyyz
Actually I wasn't really making a point. I am genuinely curious what the
performance difference is.

~~~
ojbyrne
Ah, well from experience, I'd suggest its barely noticeable.

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david_p
Hmm. So that's the price of an iPad with a keyboard and USB port.

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pshapiro
"Remember when I said that netbooks aren't good at anything and they're just
cheap laptops?"

<http://i.imgur.com/51f9p.jpg>

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mian2zi3
And it only weights 2.3lbs. Wow.

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moron4hire
wait, I thought Jobs said that netbooks sucked and he refused to make one?

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malandrew
It's not really a netbook. It a full-fledged laptop, but minified. It has a
good CPU, good GPU and plenty of disk space.

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adbge
> It has a good CPU.

Compared to my TI calculator, maybe.

~~~
wtallis
Or compared to an Intel Atom, which is the typical processor for netbooks.

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bambax
On the target page it says $1499...?

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timmaah
hit reload...

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bambax
For the record, I had (and anyway, I had never visited this page, so it was
not a local cache problem).

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malandrew
No 3G sim card support means instant fail. Seriously, this is a no-brainer
feature.

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malandrew
Why did this get downvoted? This is a machine meant for portability. Not
everywhere has WiFi and when you take into account all the different wifi
accounts (like boingo which is impossible to cancel), you end up paying a good
portion of what could have been spent on 3G service.

Also, not every country is like the US where wifi is ubiquitous.

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raganwald
I didn't downvote you, so I can only offer a guess. It could be that your
particular wording came across a little abrasively, so some people may have
felt that while the subject was interesting, the tone of the comment might
discourage open discussion and instead lead towards heated and personal flame
exchanges.

Compare and contrast to:

 _Odd that there's no 3G sim card support, this is a machine meant for
portability and touted as what happens when a Macbook hooks up with an iPad...
Which has 3G as an option._

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malandrew
Thanks for the explanation.

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ghurlman
But will it support more than one user account/profile? That's easily the
biggest complaint I have about the iPad.

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jonhendry
Why wouldn't it? It's OS X.

