Oh, there was something in the air, all right. Once everyone got over the shock of Steve Jobs adding Kanye West and Green Day to his traditional Coldplay/Gorillaz prep music, the man himself took the stage for the Macworld 08 keynote, swiftly unloading some goodies for all the good boys and girls. We love you, Santa Jobs!
And our love doesn't come cheap, either. No, it takes the MacBook Air. While it's not exactly the ultraportable computer we expected, it is thin... real thin. We're talking .76" at the hinges and .16" at the keyboard. Steve even slipped in into a Manilla envelope just for laughs. But here's the nitty-gritty: it's got a LED backlit 13.3 inch screen that goes active with almost zero warm-up... you open the MacBook Air, and it's ON. There's also the prerequisite built-in iSight webcamera, a new multi-touch trackpad that lets you manipulate objects on screen similar to the iPhone, and a full-sized backlit keyboard.
There's no optical drive, probably because parts of the Air are only marginally thicker than a DVD, but you can buy an external drive seperately for just $99. Otherwise, it comes with all your USB 2, microDVI, and headphone ports, with 802.11n WiFi and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR for connectivity. The latches are magnetic, not clips. You have to take Apple battery claims with a grain of salt (if not an entire salt mill), but they're saying it will run five hours on a full charge.
That's not all. There's an iPod-like 1.8 inch 80 GB hard drive (with an optional 64GB solid state drive) running an 1.6 GHz (upgradable to 1.8 GHz) Intel Core 2 Duo that's 60% smaller than other Core 2 Duos. We think they used black magic to do it, but that's besides the point. All this pretty will only cost $1799, and they're expected to ship within two weeks. They're up for pre-order today.
We want one.
When you get yours, as you certainly will, you should consider putting a SquareTrade laptop extended warranty on it. Sure, you could go with Apple Care if you like, but the truth is we're faster, better, we offer Accidental Damage coverage and we cost a lot less. Why? Because we're a warranty provider first, and shameless devotees to neat gadgetry second.
Feel free to use our Quote widget in the sidebar to do a little comparison shopping and check out our customer reviews on Amazon and see for yourself how good we are.
Now that we've got that out of the way, we go back to our shameless devotion to neat gadgetry.
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Apple Warranty, Macworld Keynote 2008
