MacBook Air

I'm Dan Ackerman and we are here near blocks for the Apple campus in Cupertino with the very first hands on look with the new 11.6-inch MacBook Air. As everyone expected, the newest member of the MacBook family is this 11-inch Air. It looks and feels a lot like across between the current MacBook Air and those 11-inch premium Netbooks that we've seen a lot of this year. This guy actually has an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and GeForce 320M graphics and that's pretty much the same as you'd actually get in the White 999 of MacBook, although this is an ultra low voltage of that processor, still for an 11-inch. You know, premium Netbook style system. That's a fairly reasonable composite of hardware. You're gonna find pretty much the same full-size keyboard and large multi-touch trackpad as you find on other members of the MacBook family. And the screen on this, this is actually interesting. This is the first MacBook ever with a 16 x 9 display, that's really the industry standard now. It's 13.66 x 7.68. This 13-inch version of the MacBook Air still has a 16 x 10 screen. MacBooks are really some of the only laptop left with 16 x 10 displays. Besides the new version of iLife the upcoming OS X Lion Edition and the new Apps Store, the thing you're probably gonna be most excited about is to get this not one, but count them two USB ports, that's twice as many as in the original MacBook Air and really fixes one of the main complaints people had about that system. Like the original MacBook Air, it's actually very tapered. It's about 0.68 inches in the back, tapers on very thin in the front of the 11-inch is actually just as thick as the 13-inch. It's not really thinner. And there you go. We just turned it off and turn it back on again, that's the "Instant On". That's something else people are very excited about. Observe again, I closed the lid. It goes on kind of very low power mode. And then, when you open it up, "Instant On" almost like you get with your iPad. The new 11-inch MacBook starts with 64 gigs of solid state memory for $999. It actually none an SSD hard drive that actually take the memory moguls out of it and put it right on the motherboard. And of course, you can trade up from there to more memory or faster processor or the 13-inch screen. There's one kind of bum note about the design I'm not too pleased with and that is the lack of edge, edge class on the display. You see it's got the silver vessel here. It doesn't look nearly as good as the black vessel with the glass over it that you see on other MacBooks, but that's about the only negative, so far, in our very early hands on impression. I'm Dan Ackerman and that s the new 11.6-icnh MacBook Air.