Image ganked from Mac Rumors.
Hallelujah! The MacBook family is finally getting its much-needed redesign, says Apple Insider. The MacBook will be the most dramatic with an aluminum and stainless steel casing that’s more eco-friendly. The MBP will also see a chassis redesign with a new trackpad and keyboard ala MBA. This redesign should occur when the new Montevina-based chips roll out in June since the chips have a different layout then the current Penryn chips. I guess I should have waited. Oh well.
Oh, Martha, is there anything you can’t do? You crochet doileys, make butter cake, and fire custom dildos for your friends in your outdoor kiln — all before 5am! Now you have a MacBook Air and you just love it! And you love Windows to! What is a woman to do? Run Paralells! And you even know what that is! But you don’t want to because you want to be well-versed in Windows! OK! And your dog loves the MacBook Air as well!
I also use an HP laptop on a regular basis because I like to be well versed on both platforms and be able to multi-task. Both computers sit side by side on my desk in my kitchen and having them right there together is very convenient for me.
Oh gosh.
My new MacBook Air [MarthaStewart]
This is a cute story straight out of the geek files. Charlie Rose, a TV interviewer who once interviewed our overseer, Michael Arrington, fell into a pothole on 59th Street in Manhattan while holding his brand new MacBook Air. Instead of falling on the Air, Rose took pavement to the face rather than risk breaking his sweet new laptop. Good man.
via TC
New rule; No challenging the MacBook Air if you can’t beat it in the thickness department. It’s one of its main selling points, if not THE main selling point. According to Electronista, “Frontier today put out an aggressive challenge to Apple by claiming a system which is both lighter and tougher than the MacBook Air.”
That’s all well and good but it’s thicker than the Air and the screen’s only 12-inches. My cell phone is much lighter than the MacBook Air but it’s only got a 2.8-inch screen.
I’m no Apple evangelist (I use a Sony VAIO) but these companies that put out thicker-but-lighter notebooks and then slap Apple across the face with a dueling glove is getting a bit tired. Anyway, the FRLN by Frontier of Japan is impressive, yes, so let’s try take a look at it without comparing it to the Air.
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Bob at the TSA Evolution Blog Team (the kindly gnomish face of the TSA that actually makes me think these morons are listening) responded to the intimation that MacBook Airs are weapons of mass destruction. Screeners are trained to look for certain things in laptops and other devices and when they saw an anomaly, they reacted. Good on them. They’ll also be scanning a MacBook Air to show screeners what to look for when they see SSD drives.
Apple MacBook Airs are Cleared for Takeoff [TSA]
Say it ain’t so, Steven! Mr. “Hackers” Levy believes his wife threw Apple’s loaner MacBook Air into the recycling chute with all the other paper, leading him to believe that no, he’s the only stupid one and that everyone else with little expectation that a featherlight computer will end up in a pile of other office detritus would do the same thing. This, friends, is why I’m going to wear mine around my neck like Flava.
Gone, Without a Trace [NewsWeek]
Care of the Onion
Here, friends, is the danger of depending too much on X-ray searches — there is a valley between the dangerous and the benign and most items fit in it but if you make something dangerous that looks utterly benign or make something benign that looks, to the trained TSA agent, dangerous, you’re in trouble.
Long story short, Michael Nygard was held up at the airport because TSA agents couldn’t figure out his MacBook Air.
I’m standing, watching my laptop on the table, listening to security clucking just behind me. “There’s no drive,” one says. “And no ports on the back. It has a couple of lines where the drive should be,” she continues.
A younger agent, joins the crew. I must now be occupying ten, perhaps twenty, percent of the security force. At this checkpoint anyway. There are three score more at the other five checkpoints. The new arrival looks at the printouts from x-ray, looks at my laptop sitting small and alone. He tells the others that it is a real laptop, not a “device”. That it has a solid-state drive instead of a hard disc. They don’t know what he means. He tries again, “Instead of a spinning disc, it keeps everything in flash memory.” Still no good. “Like the memory card in a digital camera.” He points to the x-ray, “Here. That’s what it uses instead of a hard drive.”
Security is all well and good and the theatre of security makes us feel great when we roll through the airport. However, the whole mess crashes down when someone tweaks the rules on either side — by removing an instantly recognized hard drive or threatening to blow up planes with liquids. That, sadly, is when things fall into absurdity. Just wait until the MacBook Quantum comes out. It probably won’t even show up on X-rays, replaced instead by a cat.
Steve Jobs Made Me Miss My Flight [MichaelNygard]
Yeah, we thought the same thing when we saw this atrocity. It was here at CeBIT, we puked a little, and we’re not happy about that.
Thinking of buying a MacBook Air, but don’t think it’s going to make enough of an impression as is? Feeling like trading that subtle design for a design that belongs on a Victorian-era fainting couch? This is the deal for you – as long as you have a spare 40 large lying around.
Bling My Thing has encrusted an Air with gilt Swarovski crystals and is selling it for $40,000 — I’m sure Puff Daddy is scraping together a few things to pawn to get this beauty. Too bad it they couldn’t encrust it with optical drives.
MacBook Air gets a dazzling $37,000 makeover [Yahoo! News, via Born Rich, via Pocket Lint]
Now this is interesting ineed. Due apparently to the high demand of the MacBook Air, Apple has put together a special page on its retail website where you can check your local availability without having to call or visit the Apple store.
It’s not live now, but it appears as if it will be later tonight. Is Apple actually selling enough Airs to warrant this new service, or is it some secret trick into making us this it is?
MacBook Air’s availability page [Apple.com]
Not that it means much, but it’s good to know I’m not the only one, even if my support is a total unknown like this Mr. Wozniak. I still feel my initial assessment of the Air as a sexy lemon is on the mark. He also shares his disappointment about the iPhone’s 2.5G-ness. This “Woz” is spreading his lukewarm enthusiasm for Apple’s latest products all over down under, where I hear people walk on their hands, and the black MacBook is the cheap one. Yeah right!
Woz finds flaws in Apple’s latest offerings [Sydney Morning Herald]
The X300 is official and it’s fabulous. It starts a $2,799 and includes a 64GB of solid-state hard drive space, GPS, and a DVD burner. It’s lighter than the Air, runs Vista, and comes in rich, Corinthian rubber. Road warriors, begin salivating.
Release
The Nikkei Electronic Teardown Squad recently tore down the MacBook Air. What did the team find? Surprises abound. Also, screws. Many, many screws.
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When John Biggs sees this his head is going to explode. It beats the crap out of that toilet seat he reviewed a few months back. A docking station for your MBA and iPod with a seated heat, multi-touch flusher, and built-in surround sound. Taking a poo has just been taken to the next level. No word on price just yet, but we’ll follow this one very closely.
Product Page
We credit the lasses at Shiny Shiny with the scoop, but it appears as if one Lily Allen, the only pop princess I actually kinda wanna make out with, has a MacBook Air, and we do not. It’s ok, though, I’m man enough for a full-sized MacBook Pro, and the Air seems perfect for Lily.
She sadly doesn’t say much about it other than it’s tiny, but here’s hoping she gives us a full review and unboxing.
Allen’s MySpace blog [MySpace, via Shiny Shiny]
If for some strange reason it wasn’t before, thin is officially in as far as notebooks are concerned. At least that’s what seems to be the case with Lenovo as it answers the MacBook Air with the ThinkPad X300. It’s thin, yes, but not quite as thin as the Air (the Air fits in an envelope, the X300 merely fits on top of a newspaper or whatever that is on the left there — hell, maybe it IS an envelope).
What it lacks in the not-as-thin-as-the-new-MacBook department it more than makes up for in the actually-comes-with-useful-stuff department, with a built-in optical drive, removable battery, three USB ports, Ethernet jack, and optional integrated high-speed cellular modem and/or GPS chips.
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Did the MacBook Air debut in Pixar’s The Incredibles?
No. No it did not. I didn’t know so many people on the Internet were English majors, looking for meaning in things where there isn’t any.
Pixar Movies revealing Apple secrets? [9 to 5 Mac]
“The people that are interested in [the MacBook Air] are not interested in buying it.” Not exactly what Apple wants to hear, you gotta figure.
Analysts over at Piper Jaffray met with resellers yesterday, resellers that voiced a fair amount of concern over sales of the MacBook Air. Of the retailers present, 60 percent said demand for the MacBook Air was less than that of the original MacBook two years ago. (But 30 percent said demand was similar. Go figure.)
Resellers are seeing the same thing that we’ve observed. The MacBook could well be too expensive for Apple’s customers.
Keep in mind that these are resellers we’re talking about, not the Apple Store or Apple.com. For all we know MacBook Air sales could be just fine. Fodder for discussion, if nothing else.
MacBook Air demand trails that of original Intel-based MacBook [AppleInsider]
The MacBook Air runs Windows Vista slightly slower than other ultraportable laptops. PC World benchmarked Apple’s tiny laptop and got a score of 61. To put those numbers in perspective, the Lenovo ThinkPad X61 got an 86, which amounts to a 5 percent “actual” speed difference, says PC World. So not only is the Air not the most fully featured laptop out there, it’s also not the fastest. (That said, the Air did best the Fujitsu LifeBook P7230 by 29 points.)
Yet another reason to think long and head whether or not the MacBook Air is for you.
MacBook Air Runs Windows Medium-Fast [PC World via MacWorld]
