Apple will not be giving up on the MacBook Air just yet, they have announced the new the Air to be released late November. The Air will be coming as standard with a 120GB HDD together with the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M video card, mini Display Port and 2GB of RAM. There will also be the option of a 128GB SSD.
After a rather lengthy discussion of where the Mac has been, Steve Jobs got back on stage and revealed a rumor to be true. All of those “brick” rumors we’d been hearing about were confirmed. The new Apple notebooks are to be carved from a solid brick of aluminum for a lighter and stronger product.
The Iomega eGo external hard drive debuted today with a very specific target market in mind: MacBook Air owners. The 2.5-inch portable drive is perfect for backing up your information on the fly.
While the Apple Let’s Rock event yesterday may have brought joy to anybody looking at buying a new iPod, those hoping for a surprise computing announcement to round out the show will have gone home disappointed. That, according to Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, was all part of the Apple plan, however; he quotes sources “familiar with Apple’s hardware plans” who say the company is planning an event on October 14th specifically dealing with new MacBooks.
Intel have announced general availability of the small-footprint Core 2 Duo CPU it created especially for Apple’s MacBook Air ultraportable. The chipset, based around a Merom processor and Intel 965 chipset, is around 60-percent smaller than a traditional processor and controller. Lenovo and HP have already signed up to use the new silicon, in their X301 and 2530p notebooks respectively.
Apple is preparing to update its MacBook Air ultraportable with a standard Penryn-class Core 2 Duo processor, according to the latest rumors from PhoneNews. The move would see the company replacing the existing Merom-class CPU that Intel specially modified for the compact notebook. That CPU had been tweaked to save power and was only available in 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz speeds; the new processors could potentially range from 2.26GHz to 3.06GHz with a 1,066MHz FSB.
Latest nugget from the Apple rumor train comes courtesy of Seth Weintraub, who has been collating the various rumors from “insiders on the new MacBooks”. Most people are assuming that the “product transition” the Cupertino company was referring to in their recent financial conference call indicates a Q4 refresh of the MacBook and MacBook Pro lines, and Seth is saying no different; apparently the new designs will be thinner than the existing models, and borrow some of the more rounded design language seen on the coveted MacBook Air. The trackpad, too, is in for a change, sounding like an LCD-free version of the iPhone’s interface: glass, multitouch and supporting gestures.
Apple has reduced the cost of specifying the solid-state drive option on its Air ultraportable notebook. The SSD, originally priced at $999, now costs $599 as an addition to the 1.6GHz entry-level Air. The 1.8GHz Air, which is pre-configured with the SSD, has dropped to $2,598.
Apple’s MacBook Air is undoubtedly a thing of beauty, and its slender little companion DVD burner is not far behind. Unfortunately, until now only Air owners could enjoy it; despite the best efforts of many, only when plugged into the skinny Apple notebook would the SuperDrive play ball. Initial suspicions were that the Air’s solitary USB port was supercharged power-wise; turns out, it’s actually down to some custom firmware in the IDE to USB bridge. tnkgrl set out testing the drive and finally hacking it with a replacement bridge; she now has a slick external burner that will work with any computer.
Video demonstrating the hacked SuperDrive after the cut
Hang on, surely this isn’t Microsoft putting a new Voodoo Envy in with Apple’s MacBook Air and expecting the two to fight like savage monkeys? I can’t imagine they’d stoop to such cruelty, so I can only think that the Air showed up to see how the new “thinnest ultraportable notebook” measures up. As you can see, it’s night and day (unless you choose the silver Envy, in which case it’s basically day and day) in terms of obvious styling.
SlashGear Japan
