Gadgetory

I'm Dan Ackerman and we are here mere blocks from the Apple Campus in Cupertino with a 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 a cross between the current netbook 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 NVIDIA GeForce 320 m graphics and that's pretty much the same as you'd actually get in the white $9.99 a back book although this is an ultra low voltage version of that processor still for an 11 inch you know premium netbook style system that's a fairly reasonable powerful set 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 really interesting this is the first MacBook ever with a 16 by 9 display that's really the industry standard now it's 1366 by 768 the 13 inch version of the MacBook Air still has a 16 by 10 screen MacBooks are really some of the only laptops left with 16 by 10 displays resides a new version of iLife the upcoming OS 10 lion Edition and the new app store the thing you're probably gonna be most excited about is get this not one but count'em 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 that tapers on very thin in the front the 11 inch is actually just as thick at the 13 inch it's not really any 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 close the lid it goes into 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 $9.99 it's actually not an SSD hard drive they actually take the memory modules out of it and put it right on the motherboard and of course you can trade up from there to more memory or a faster processor or the 13 inch screen there's one kind of thumb note about the design I'm not too pleased with and that is the lack of itch glass on the display you see it's got the silver bezel here it doesn't look nearly as good as a black bezel 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 impressions I'm Dan Ackerman and then is the new 11.6 inch MacBook Air