DesignAmazingly thin. Amazingly full-size.The thinness of MacBook Air is stirring. But perhaps more impressive, there’s a full-size notebook encased in the 0.16 to 0.76 inch of sleek, sturdy anodized aluminum. And at just 3.0 pounds,¹ MacBook Air is more than portable — it’s with you everywhere you go.

A no-compromise display.

The glossy 13.3-inch, widescreen LED backlit MacBook Air display is the same viewable size as the screen on MacBook. The 1280-by-800 resolution gives you vibrant images and rich colors at full brightness the moment you open MacBook Air. So you get full-screen performance with all the benefits of a slim design.

Full-size, full-feature keyboard.

The keyboard is full-size with crisp keys just like the ones on MacBook. But MacBook Air goes further by adding backlit key illumination, making it easy to work in low-light settings such as airplanes and conference halls. A built-in ambient light sensor automatically adjusts keyboard and display brightness for optimal visibility. And with the oversize multi-touch trackpad, it just keeps getting better for fingers.

Features

The brilliance of multi-touch.

MacBook Air includes an oversize trackpad with multi-touch technology. You can pinch, swipe, or rotate to zoom in on text, advance through a photo album, or adjust an image. This gesture-based input so successful on iPhone and iPod touch now comes to MacBook.

A smart LED display.

The backlit LED display allows for an even thinner build. It provides instant full-screen brightness the moment you open MacBook Air. The mercury- and arsenic-free display is also more power efficient, which translates to longer battery life.

Thin is in the details.

The innovative now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t port hatch flips down to reveal (and closes to hide) all the ports you really need: a USB 2.0 port, a headphone jack, and a micro-DVI port that supports DVI, VGA, composite, and S-video output. Even the MagSafe power connection has been reconsidered and slimmed to fit MacBook Air.

So thin yet so expansive.

MacBook Air comes with a way-more-than-generous 2GB of RAM built in — ample memory for working with your favorite applications. The 80GB hard drive provides plenty of storage space. And you have the option to upgrade to a 64GB solid-state drive, which has no moving parts for enhanced durability.

Micro. Chip.

MacBook Air performance is as impressive as its form, thanks to its 1.6GHz or 1.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. This chip was custom-built to fit within the compact dimensions of MacBook Air.

Built-in iSight camera.

Unlike most other ultraportable notebooks, MacBook Air includes a built-in iSight camera. It’s so smartly integrated, you hardly notice it’s there. The iSight camera and iChat software make video chatting easy anywhere there’s a wireless network.²

The battery is slimmer.
The performance isn’t.

The MacBook Air battery is our thinnest ever, yet it doesn’t compromise power. You can access the web wirelessly for five full hours.

Wireless

Born free.

Without wires, you’re free to go anywhere.

MacBook Air is the notebook that allows for a fully wireless lifestyle. It all starts with the fastest-available, next-generation 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR built in. And that’s just the beginning of the unprecedented wireless capabilities of MacBook Air.

Ahead of the curve.

In redefining thin, MacBook Air has shed something you no longer need: the optical drive. That’s because MacBook Air is built for the wireless world. So instead of watching DVDs, you can rent movies wirelessly from the iTunes Store. And instead of backing up files to a stack of discs, you can back up files wirelessly using Apple’s new Time Capsule.

However, for those times when you still need to install software on MacBook Air from a CD or DVD, a new feature called Remote Disc lets you wirelessly use or “borrow” the optical drive of a Mac or PC in the vicinity. So you can have full access to an optical drive without having to haul one around. 

Remote Disc: How it works.

1. Set up Remote Disc on a nearby Mac or PC.Select a nearby Mac or PC with an optical drive. On that computer, install the Remote Disc Setup software (found on the supplied Mac OS X Install DVD). It is now permanently enabled for Remote Disc.
2. Insert the software disc you want to install.Insert the DVD containing the software you want to install on MacBook Air into the optical drive of the Remote Disc-enabled Mac or PC.
3. Install the software on MacBook Air.In the Finder on MacBook Air, under Devices, select the icon that says Remote Disc. Click on the computer you enabled, and then double-click to open the software DVD. Now proceed with the installation just as if you had a built-in optical drive.

Even migration is wireless.

How do you transfer all of your files, music, photos, and other valuable content from your old Mac to your new MacBook Air? Forget the FireWire cable — that’s the old way. MacBook Air lets you migrate everything wirelessly.

When you turn on MacBook Air for the first time, Setup Assistant walks you through the initial setup. Install the Remote Disc Setup software on the old Mac, and it will then be available to transfer information onto your new MacBook Air. It’s all wireless. All simple. And all secure.

Introducing wireless backup.

Mac OS X Leopard brought you Time Machine, the built-in backup that automatically copies files to an external drive. And now, Time Capsule — the new hard drive plus Wi-Fi base station — lets you use Time Machine to wirelessly back up your files. It’s effort free and yet another way MacBook Air lets you live and work untethered.

Wireless movie rentals.

With iTunes, you can now rent, download, and watch the latest blockbuster hits as well as classic movies on MacBook Air. So you can have one of the world’s thinnest, lightest cinemas with you wherever you go.

This is my Band-pass Filter Circuit.

With 300+ new features, Leopard is the most impressive Mac OS X version yet.

Just one look at the desktop in Mac OS X Leopard says you’ve arrived someplace new. From the menu bar to the stunning new Dock, Leopard is designed to help you enjoy the time you spend at your computer — and help you get more out of it.

Stacked in your favor.

Does your desktop get cluttered? You’re hardly alone. So you’ll love one of the most useful new features in Leopard: Stacks. A stack is a Dock item that gives you fast access to a folder of files. When you click a stack, the files within spring from the Dock in a fan or a grid, depending on the number of items (or the preference you set). Leopard starts you off with two premade stacks: one for downloads and the other for documents. The Downloads stack automatically captures files downloaded from Safari, Mail, and iChat, and the Documents stack is a great place to keep things like presentations, spreadsheets, and word processing files. You can create as many stacks as you wish simply by dragging folders to the right side of your Dock. Pretty neat.

An eye-opening experience.

The new desktop has a semitransparent menu bar and a reflective 3D Dock that perfectly frame your desktop picture — whether you use one of the beautiful included images or customize it with a favorite from your iPhoto library.  The Dock has a bright active-application signal, and the look of Leopard extends to all applications. Every window has a consistent design theme, and active applications are even more distinct, casting deeper shadows.

Lukewarm on the heels of Intel’s Centrino Duo mobile processors (and following the news that there’ll be a Core 2 Duo), AMD has just launched its own dual-core mobile chips, known as the Turion 64 X2 Mobile series. Like the Centrino Duo chips, the X2 is designed with multi-tasking performance and long battery life in mind.

We’ve got one of the first laptops to take advantage of the new chip. Politics dictates that we can’t tell you who it’s from, but luckily we can still put it through its paces to see how AMD’s new mobile chip compares to the existing Intel offerings.

The X2-powered laptop (we’ll call it ‘Gemima’) uses the fastest X2 processor in the range, the 2GHz TL-60, 1GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce Go 7600 graphics adaptor. We compared it to the Acer Travelmate 8204WLMi for performance and the results make for interesting reading.

The Travelmate, which uses a 2GHz Centrino Duo T2600 processor and 2GB of RAM, achieved a PCMark 2005 score of 4,236. By comparison, the new X2-powered Gemima achieved 4,025. This indicates that the new AMD chip is around 5 per cent slower, but let’s not forget that the Travelmate has twice as much memory, which may have influenced its score slightly.

We should also remember that the X2 is a 64-bit chip (the Core Duo is 32-bit) and will, in theory, wipe the floor with Intel Core Duo when running alongside a 64-bit operating system such as Windows Vista.

Swings and roundabouts you may argue. But what about the graphics performance? We subjected both laptops to demanding 3DMark 2006 tests, and the Travelmate won that battle too, scoring 1,999 versus Gemima’s 1,649. Our friends at Nvidia claim Gemima’s GeForce Go 7600 should have beaten the Travelmate’s Radeon X1600 comfortably, but not in this case. Regardless, we’d love to see how the two CPUs fare when using identical graphics processing units (GPUs).

Despite its apparent loss, the X2 fared very well against its Centrino Duo competition, especially in light of the fact that the TL-60 costs nearly £300 less than the equivalent T2600 Intel chip. This means X2-powered laptops should be cheaper than their Intel counterparts, but we expect Intel to chop its prices to stay competitive.

We’ll let you know how the X2 laptop fared in the other critical area of laptop performance – battery life – in the coming days, and have a full review appearing in the very near future. -RR

Source: http://crave.cnet.co.uk/laptops/0,39029450,49273534,00.htm

Oh man, this fellow has lured me to buy him.

But then, after thinking and thinking…

It will be very nice if my Ngage QD has turned into VistaGage.