Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the MacBook Air, a computer that the company billed as the world’s thinnest notebook — small enough to fit inside an interoffice mailing envelope. It’s priced starting at $1,799 and will be available within two weeks. Sporting a silvery finish, the MacBook Air features a 13.3-inch LED-backlit widescreen display that has a 1280 x 800 pixel resolution. The backlighting saves power and provide “instant on” response from the moment you turn it on, according to Jobs. The device has a slightly wedge-shaped profile. It weighs about 3 pounds, and sports a thickness of 0.16-0.76 inches. Its 12.8 inches wide and 8.95 inches deep.

MACBOOK AIR Technical specs

If there’s one thing Apple knows how to do its build desirable items - and its latest laptop is no different. The MacBook Air is impossibly thin - measuring just 4mm thick at the front and stretching up to a hardly bulky 19.3mm at the back. In fact, even its thickest part is still slimmer than most notebooks’ thinnest bit.

But just because it’s thin, doesn’t mean it’s underpowered. Apple has managed to cram in a 1.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 2GB of RAM. The hard drive is a little on the cramped side at 80GB, but it’s still plenty for all but the most demanding of users. It also features a full 13.3in LED backlit screen, so it’s still a joy to work on.

Its reduced footprint does mean you only get a single USB port and no optical drive - but it does come with a utility that lets it piggy back the drive of other machines on the network. It also offers an impressive five hour battery life.

The computer uses a 1.8-inch disk drive, on which no more than 80 gigabytes of data can be stored. Memory is limited to a standard two gigabytes of RAM and its processor is slower than those of Apple’s other laptops. The design team jettisoned an optical disk storage device for playing DVDs. Mr. Jobs demonstrated a feature called Remote Disk that will make it possible to play the contents of a DVD via a wireless network from another Macintosh or Windows PC. Also, the MacBook Air’s battery is not removable.

The MacBook Air is a dramatic departure for Apple:
It’s a narrowly-targeted hardware product. The critics hate it because their rumor-fuelled dreams have been dashed and they will have to keep lugging their 12″ PowerBooks around for a few more years. But then the Critics are not the target market for this product and they don’t seem to understand that large, profitable markets for highly cost-controlled products exist outside of their domain. Apple has plenty of narrowly-targeted software products (Final Cut Pro for instance) and these don’t attract the same howls of derision. But then those products target markets by adding specialized features and charging appropriately. Taking features away, as Apple did with iMovie in iLife08, is bound to cause geek grief because the expectation exists that the monotonic march toward “better” is always along the “more” axis. Not so. So who will be buying the world’s thinnest laptop? A simple answer: anyone who values it highly enough. That will include executives and sales people who travel, present, and are seen with their laptop in important business situations. They value low weight and looks above everything else. They already have a Mac at home, including maybe a MacBook of some sort, but they will still buy a MacBook Air because it gives them the things they cannot get otherwise. This is the Miata of the laptop world: a second or third purchase after the most critical needs have been fulfilled, only for those who have the juice to make what they want real. MacBook Air is clearly a companion computer. Apple has stripped everything from it that is not necessary in order to save weight and space. What is left is an interesting set: wireless Ethernet, audio out, video out, and USB 2.0. Those cover what must be the four most numerous connections on the planet right now. And once you pair it with a companion Mac, you have everything you need for anything. The breathtaking omission for many is that the battery is built-in. But why are batteries removable in the first place? Removable batteries represent a huge additional cost in every aspect of Apple’s business: more design, more material, more safety concerns, more stock, more line items, more connectors, more testing; the list goes on and on. The overall product design gains enormously by building the battery in, as Apple has shown with the iPod and, more recently, the iPhone. To me, the inclusion of a back-lit full-size keyboard cements the target market as that of highly mobile, highly responsible, highly visible individuals whose time and presence carries a high price. We’ll be seeing lots of these in the real world, many of them in dim lighting and accompanied by the whirr of a projector fan.