High-quality photos and notes on Apple's new MacBook Air

Apple at the Macworld Expo on Tuesday had several dozen of its new MacBook Air notebooks laid out on a sprawling matte black showroom table for show-goers to test drive, in addition several non-functional units suspended in mid-air for photographers.

Some initial notes

• The MacBook Air is so thin that it's difficult for our digital SLR to auto focus on the side profile of the unit.
• Apple staffers on the show floor appear to be somewhat clueless about which specific Intel Core 2 Duo chip the MacBook Air employs, but we're still working on nailing this down. Apple lists the specs as Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 4MB on-chip shared L2 cache running at full processor speed.
• Like Apple's other MacBooks, the system bus speed is 800MHz.
• It runs on Mac OS X 10.5.1 build 9B2324
• Weight is exactly 3.0 pounds (1.36 kg).
• Height is 0.16-0.76 inch (0.4-1.94 cm).
• Width is 12.8 inches (32.5 cm).
• Depth is 8.94 inches (22.7 cm).
• The 2GB of 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM is soldered to the motherboard. So no memory upgrades available.
• The multi-touch trackpad works with ease and better than you would expect, at least in the applications Apple is using for demos.
• The battery is a integrated, non-replacable 37-watt-hour lithium-polymer.
• Model identifier is MacBook Air1,1
• Boot ROM Version is MBA11.00BB.B00
• SMC Version is 1.23f7
• A Sudden Motion Sensor is enabled.
• In addition to the $99 MacBook Air external SuperDrive, Apple is also offering a $29 USB Ethernet Adapter, $49 MagSafe Airline Adapter, and $19 Apple Micro-DVI to Video Adapter.

For more photos, continue on to page 2 of this report.