January 25th, 2008
Details surface on the MacBook Air
Some lucky stiffs have already received the MacBook Air and details are starting to emerge.Take for example Walt Mossberg’s revelation that “it’s beautiful and thin, but omits features.” Mossberg also reveals that the MBA gets 3 hours and 24 minutes of battery life running full kilter:
In my standard battery test, where I disable all power-saving features, set the screen brightness at maximum, turn on the Wi-Fi and play an endless loop of music, the MacBook Air’s battery lasted 3 hours, 24 minutes. That means you could likely get 4.5 hours in a normal work pattern, almost the five hours Apple claims.
Newsweek’s Steven Levy weighs in with The Skinny on the MacBook Air and USA Today’s Edward C. Baig writes MacBook Air: The sexy kind of skinny but with some flaws. For those that are too busy to read, Gizmodo has posted a handy MBA review matrix.
You can also check out the preliminary unboxing pictures and the size comparison to a Sony Vaio.
Move fast if you want to see the video of opening the bottom case to peek at the battery (better check the Google cache on this one, Apple spanked Gizmodo for opening their loaner machine).
The bottom casing has 10 screws, all #00 Phillips, but there are 3 different screw lengths… Nine screws hold the battery in.
Engadget has the full skinny (sorry) on the MBA’s Remote Disk feature (no movie playback, no HD support).
And don’t forget my colleague David Morgenstern’s dissection of the MacBook Air technical note.
The Air uses a North Bridge chip with Intel GMA X3100 graphics, a 1.8-inch PATA (parallel ATA) hard drive, mono speaker and 4MB flash EFI boot EEPROM.
I ordered mine on 15 January, right after the keynote address and the Apple Store says that it will ship on 06 February.
What about you?
Jason D. O'Grady is the editor of PowerPage.org, which has been publishing daily mobile technology news since December 1995. For disclosures on Jason's industry affiliations, click here or to view Jason's full profile click here.
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