On the ground with Apple's MacBook Air
24959
Love him or hate him, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has the keen ability to get people excited about anything and everything, regardless if you even care what he's talking about.
474441
Gabe: So I picked up my MacBook Pro a few months back and I would not call myself a convert but I do really like it. I"ve been doing all the basic iLife stuff, like making DVD"s of Gabe"s birthday party and photocasting pictures to the family. I am getting much more comfortable with the Mac but there are still some things I don"t quite understand and so I have a couple questions for you guys.
234619
Appleâs Steven P. Jobs introduced an elegant new MacBook, and is betting he can mimic his digital music success with movies.
28453
Start-up Axiotron shows off its Modbook, a keyboard-free tablet computer that began its life as an Apple MacBook. And yes, it's authorized by Apple.
562413
Mac OS X âLeopard is powerful, polished and carefully conceived. Happy surprises, and very few disappointments, lie around every corner. This Leopard has more than 300 new spots â and most of them are bright ones,â declares David Pogue (New York Times). He points, for example, to two âroutine-changingâ features. Time Machine, which offers âthe shortest setup of any backup system in history.â And Quick Look, which lets you âview the contents of a documentâs icon at full size, right at the desktop, without having to open the program that created it.â Pogue says âitâs fantastic.â
323977
Jobs recaps the news. There's MacBook Air, iPhone tweaks and iTunes movie rentals. Is there one more thing? Nope.
359289
In this one-minute video, Wired's Jose Fermoso checks out Apple's new, ultra-light, ultra-slim MacBook Air.
28838
Maworld promises that ''something is in the air.'' Steve Jobs will deliver it beginning Tuesday morning.
581418
A new wafer-thin laptop and a movie rental service for iTunes starred in this year&#39;s keynote from Apple CEO Steve Jobs at Macworld Tuesday.The notebook, called the MacBook Air, wasn&#39;t the ultraportable that pundits had predicted, but it is &quot;the world&#39;s thinnest notebook,&quot; according to Jobs, who produced it from a manilla office envelope to make his point.Priced from $1,799, the notebook has a 13.3-inch widescreen display and a full-sized backlit keyboard. To keep the MacBook Air compact, it uses the same 1.8-inch hard drive found in the iPod and a smaller version of Intel&#39;s Core 2 Duo processor built especially for Apple, Jobs said.The model shown at Macworld was in brushed silver. It is three quarters of an inch thick at its thickest part and just 0.16 inch along the front edge, Jobs said. He compared it to another popular thin laptop, the Sony TZ series. At 3 pounds (1.3 kilograms), it is about the same weight, he said, but the new Apple notebook is about half its thickness.&quot;To fit an entire Mac in this thing was a major feat of engineering,&quot; Jobs said.The MacBook Air will ship in about two weeks. It lacks an optical disk drive, which could make it tricky to load software. To get around that, Apple developed a program called Remote Disk, which allows users to download software from the optical drive of a nearby computer using its built in 802.11n wireless connection.The standard configuration comes with an 80GB hard drive, 2GB of main memory, and a 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo. Options include a 64GB solid-state drive and a faster 1.8GHz processor.Intel developed a Core 2 Duo chip package for Apple that is 60 percent smaller than the standard version, according to Jobs. &quot;It&#39;s the width of a dime and as thick as a nickel, with 400 million transistors,&quot; said Intel CEO Paul Otellini, who joined Jobs onstage.Apple will sell an optional portable optical drive for $99, Jobs said. He promised a battery life of 5 hours while surfing the Web and with Wi-Fi enabled.Many had expected Apple to announce an ultraportable notebook, which would have filled a gap in Apple&#39;s notebook product line, noted Robbie Laughlin, an assistant retail manager with Apple reseller Carbon Computing in Toronto.&quot;They had a 12-inch PowerBook a few years ago, and I&#39;d like to see something small like that reintroduced,&quot; he said before Jobs began his speech.Still, Apple&#39;s computer business is riding high from the popularity of its iPods and iPhone, Laughlin said. &quot;They&#39;re still on an upswing. We&#39;ve seen a huge uptick in switchers the last six months, people who wouldn&#39;t normally walk into an Apple store.&quot;The other big focus of Jobs&#39; speech was movies, including a movie rental service for iTunes and a new version of Apple TV that allows renting and downloading movies directly to a TV without using a PC.Apple signed major film studios -- Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, Disney, Sony, Universal, and Paramount -- to sell movies through the store. Rentals are $3.99 for a new release and $2.99 for older films, or a dollar more for high-definition versions.The movie rentals are available in the United States from Tuesday, and later this year internationally, Jobs said. Apple pledged to have 1,000 films available by the end of February, and films will come to iTunes 30 days after their DVD release, he said. Users will have 30 days to watch a film after renting it, and 24 hours to finish watching it after they have started.Apple TV wasn&#39;t more successful because it was sold as &quot;an accessory for your computer,&quot; Jobs said. &quot;That&#39;s not what people wanted. ... So we&#39;re back with Apple TV 2. It still syncs with your computer [if you want it to], but no computer is required.&quot;Apple TV also received a price cut to $229 from $299. The new version will be available in two weeks, Jobs said, and existing customers will be able to update to the new software.He didn&#39;t show a 3G iPhone as some had expected, but he did announce software updates available from Tuesday, including the ability to map an iPhone user&#39;s location with Wi-Fi hotspots and cellular towers. The iPhone update also lets people send a text message to multiple users.The iPhone shipped 200 days ago and 4 million have been sold since, Jobs said. The software developer kit for the iPhone will ship in February, he said.Jobs also introduced a wireless backup product called Time Capsule, a companion to the&#160;Leopard operating system&#39;s Time Machine, which constantly backs up work to a desktop hard drive. Time Capsule will ship in February and is basically an Airport Extreme base station plus a hard drive, Jobs said, &quot;so you can back up your notebook wirelessly.&quot;Time Capsule will come in two models, with a 500GB offering for $299 and a 1TB version for $499.
527494
MacBook Air users might need to move their new ultra-thin laptops to keep bits moving to and fro, Apple Inc. said in a note on its support site, just one of several problems posted now that the new portable has started shipping.
497740
If my hunch is correct,â writes Julio Ojeda-Zapata , âbusiness-class airliner cabins will be filled with corporate types whipping out their MacBook Airs for work amid admiring glances from seatmates.â MacBook Air, after all, âis one sexy portable,â a laptop that âscreams luxury with its extra-bright display (a newfangled light-emitting-diode variant) and a full-size, backlit keyboard that has a great, firm feel.â Ojeda-Zapata suggests that âbusiness types needing ultraportability with style and comfort wonât be able to resist the Air. They can even wedge Windows in there (I did so with no trouble).â
6065
But the Air clones will be coming anyway The reduced-size 65nm Core 2 Duo designed by Intel and incorporated inside Apple's super-slim MacBook Air is available for other computer makers to buy, the chip company confirmed last week.â¦
417698
The oohs and aahs from Tuesday's unveiling of Apple's new MacBook Air have died down -- mostly. Now it's time to take a closer look at just what Steve Jobs pulled out of that envelope at the Macworld Expo.
554084
Apple's ultrathin MacBook Air refocuses attention on  ultraportable laptops. How does it stack up against the competing Fujitsu's LifeBook P8010 and Toshiba's Portege R500?
498421
MacWorld Preview Neglected computer biz is owed a relaunch
103021
Apple is taking orders for an optical drive and an Ethernet adapter that plug into the MacBook Air's USB port.
495206
âFor a lot of people,â says Ken Mingis , âsmaller and lighter is better when it comes to their laptops.â  He considers MacBook Air âone of the coolest-looking laptops to appear in years â both in terms of size and hipness.â It has âa gorgeous display that looks sharper and brighter on the Air than it does on the regular MacBook.â And, he says, âwaking it up from sleep mode took about 2 seconds, and the LED backlighting means the screen hit full brightness as soon as it was awake.â As for performance: âThe Air feels just about as snappy as my MacBook Pro in day-to-day use doing the kinds of things most users will be doing: surfing the Web, firing off e-mails, text editing and light graphics work.â