The New MacBook Air
Apple released its new Macbook Air on the 20 October. At its thickest point it is .68-inch and weighs just 2.9lbs. It uses a complete unibody aluminum construction, has a full sized keyboard, full sized glass trackpad which is touch enabled, 13.3-inch LED display (1440×900), Core 2 Duo processor (1.86GHz or 2.13GHz ) , NVIDIA GeForce 320m and Facetime camera. Apple is also releasing a 11.6-inch version which weighs just 2.3lbs – the specifications are comparable yet the screen has a 1366×768 resolution.
The old MacBook Air was 0.76-inches thick and weighed 3lbs. Battery life on the new machine is 5 hours for the 11.6-inch model, and around 7 on the 13.3-inch model. There is no hard drive or optical drive – Apple has moved to flash storage – solid state. This means “instant on”.
The release of this new product reaffirms the importance of the Macbook to Apple. It was disclosed today that Macbook sales account for around 33% of Apples profits, at around $22 billion per year. To put this into perspective, if the Macbook was a standalone company of its own it would be 110 on the Fortune 500 list!
Check out this video for more information:
Driving the airless Air Car could be a better experience
Last December, Green Car Advisor’s Nick Kurczewski was able to snag a ride in MDI’s AIRPod. Now, the lucky punk journalist has taken a turn behind the wheel. The short version of his review: this could be the car of the future and it feels like an amusement park ride, but it’s no Millennium Falcon. Seriously.
As we know, the Air Car uses compressed air to power a small two-cylinder engine. The 180cc poweplant produces 5.4 horsepower, but MDI is working on a upgraded AIRPod GT will have 8 hp. Kurczewski says the AIRPod’s joystick steering is modified from the original design, which would have seen the speed and deceleration controlled by the stick as well as direction. That complicated-sounding mess has been scrapped in favor of more traditional pedals + joystick.
Check out all the details – including why driving a bubble car with no openable windows in June is not a good idea and how MDI plans to bring dozens of AIRPods to airports and universities and other locations around the world – over at Inside Line. Thanks to throwback for the tip!