Drawing from some of the most pivotal points in his life, Steve Jobs, chief executive officer and co-founder of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, urged graduates to pursue their dreams and see the opportunities in life’s setbacks – including death itself.  His speech never fails to inspire me, and with his recent passing away it’s never been more poignant. RIP Steve Jobs.

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:

“This was a very typical time. I was single. All you needed was a cup of tea, a light, and your stereo, you know, and that’s what I had.”….. Steve Jobs

Photo Credit: Diana Walker from the book ‘The Bigger Picture’