The New MacBook Air Part I : Design

We learned a lot from iPad. The new MacBook Air is proof. It’s designed around all-flash storage for better responsiveness and reliability. It features a trackpad with full Multi-Touch support. And though it’s incredibly thin and light, its large battery gives you portable power that lasts for hours.

A truly mobile device needs to be light, thin and strong enough to take with you wherever you go. It also needs to perform quickly, spring to life instantly and have enough battery power to keep up with you. It should have no spinning hard drive, no optical drive and no unnecessary parts. All of that is true of iPad. And now, it’s true of Apple’s most mobile notebook ever: MacBook Air.

 

MacBook Air continues its legacy of firsts with something entirely new for any Mac: flash storage. Standard. In fact, the new MacBook Air is designed completely around flash storage. But in a totally different way. Typically, flash storage is housed in a package that’s the same size as a conventional hard drive. Yet the flash chips themselves occupy a very small portion of that housing. Getting rid of the hard drive enclosure and using only the parts that matter — the actual flash chips — frees up about 90 percent more space. And just like that, there’s room for other important things, like a bigger battery. Now you have a notebook that weighs practically nothing and runs for hours on a single charge. That’s mobility mastered.

No one knows Multi-Touch technology better than Apple. Introduced with the very first iPhone and taken even further with iPad, Multi-Touch is now part of practically every Apple device. It’s simply the best and most personal way to interact with your software. And the optimal way to experience Multi-Touch on a notebook is through a trackpad. That’s precisely the case with MacBook Air. Now you can perform more gestures than you have fingers on a roomier, all-glass surface that’s smooth to the touch.

If you looked inside MacBook Air, you’d see something remarkable: how much space we devoted to the battery. Apple engineers were able to fit all the computer components on one of our smallest logic boards ever. Removing the flash storage enclosure and placing the flash chips on the logic board freed up even more room. And voila: space for a bigger battery. So you can get up to 5 hours of battery life on the 11-inch MacBook Air and up to 7 hours on the 13-inch model. And when you put MacBook Air to sleep for more than an hour, it enters what’s called standby mode. So you can come back to MacBook Air a day, a week — even up to an entire month later — and it wakes in an instant.¹ Time is on your side, courtesy of MacBook Air.

 

FaceTime Camera

The FaceTime camera inside the MacBook Air unibody display is even thinner than the one inside iPhone 4.

When MacBook Air first debuted, it was ground-breaking in many ways. Chief among them was the precision unibody enclosure. Now that same engineering process comes to the MacBook Air display. Just like the main enclosure, the display housing is crafted from a single piece of aluminium, with all the structural elements machined directly into it. Total unibody construction means a less complex design with fewer parts. That makes MacBook Air exceptionally thin and light, yet still durable enough to handle the rigors of everyday use.