Josh Ong
The photos, ">obtained by Engadget from an anonymous source, show a unibody frame that appears to be for a 13.3-inch laptop computer, which could possibly be an early prototype of an upcoming revision to the MacBook Air. The computer appears to have USB plugs on both the left and right sides, Mini DisplayPort and an SD card reader.
Engadget's source claims the rest of the machine is also unibody, including the "large single mouse button," but the screen will keep the current MacBook Air style, instead of the "edge-to-edge glass with black edges" that current MacBook Pro models have.
The laptop allegedly runs the same 1.86 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo as the current MacBook Air, further evidence that the photos are of an early prototype. Engadget's source claims "the model dates back to at least April."
The unverified photos represent "just one SKU," so Apple may have something else in store as well, wrote author Paul Miller.
AppleInsider confirmed Friday through several independent sources that Apple will release a smaller 11.6-inch MacBook Air next Wednesday at the company's "Back to the Mac" special event.
Another source familiar with the matter believes the smaller form factor will forgo conventional hard-disk drive (HDD) or solid state drive (SSD) storage options in favor of an "SSD Card" that resembles a stick of RAM, although AppleInsider is unable to confirm this detail.
Earlier this month, AppleInsider reported that supplies of the two existing 13.3-inch MacBook Airs had dried up throughout the company's indirect sales channels, suggesting that a complete overhaul to the line was imminent.
Malcolm Owen
Christine McKee
Amber Neely
82 Comments
Yep- that's it!
I mean, I've got nothing to go on here... but at least I can say I called it if I'm right...
Only 2 gigs of RAM? Disappointing.
that could be my spleen!
Ugh!
Another source familiar with the matter believes the smaller form factor will forgo conventional hard-disk drive (HDD) or solid state drive (SSD) storage options in favor of an "SSD Card" that resembles a stick of RAM, although AppleInsider is unable to confirm this detail.
It's in the picture, which quite unmistakably is an Apple laptop. Macbook Air RAM is soldered to the motherboard, which is the set of 8 chips just above the battery = 2GB. The SSD chip would be the board to the left of that, which resembles SSD chips in netbooks:
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/p...DMPES-32G.html
If they are using 25nm, it looks like 64GB x 4 = 256GB; if not, it would be 128GB. 256GB is plenty for most folks but I'm a bit disappointed by 2GB of RAM. I guess the SSD is fast enough to act as swap space but 3-4GB should be the minimum these days.
It'll be interesting to see what speed they get out of the SSD part. Sony manages to put their one in a quad RAID-0 configuration:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrWfEw84faw
1.2GB copy in under 4 seconds so >300MB/s sequential write. They use a proprietary SSD chip to do this.
What I find interesting about devices like the Air is that people generally view them as the special cases but they are really more of a glimpse of the future for all laptops and I like it. I would love to see a Macbook styled pretty much the same way but with standard RAM slots to support up to 8GB and obviously more ports. If the SSD is 256GB, the Macbook can have that too.
What this MBA style suggests to me is that the price won't be much cheaper than it is now and they'd have to bring it into Macbook pricing.
I could be wrong, but using my handy-dandy trackpad zoom feature, doesn't that label on the right say something about Sanyo and Compaq and some model number that begins with an "FX-"?