New MacBook Air rumors were almost as rampant as those for the iPhone 5 heading into this morning's news, when Apple, as predicted, updated its thinnest laptops with a glut of new parts and features.
The Apple MacBook Air 13-inch and 11-inch, which are up for pre-order today, received the necessary Sandy Bridge components to compete with the wave of "Ultrabooks" slated to arrive this year and next. In addition to new innards, the Airs will get the Thunderbolt port—Intel's high-speed connection technology—a backlit keyboard, and Mac OS X Lion.
The new Airs look almost identical to previous models save for the tiny lightning bolt branded next to the mini-DisplayPort, signaling that it's now Thunderbolt-ready. Thunderbolt's 10Gbps transfer speeds, which is roughly 22 times the speed of USB 2.0, applies to the Airs as they did to the MacBook Pros, which were the first Apple systems to use it. The major hurdle, as with any nascent connector technology, is developing a peripheral ecosystem around it.
After numerous complaints from Air users, Apple has brought back the backlit keyboard, which was removed from the second-generation MacBook Air. The flash storage capacities remained untouched from the previous versions: The Air 11-inch starts at 64GB and tops at 128GB, while the Air 13-inch keeps it at 128GB and 256GB. And surprisingly, the FaceTime Webcams aren't HD or the type that captures 720p video.
Living in these drives is Mac OS 10.7 Lion, Apple's latest OS release. Air users, or any Mac user for that matter, can start using features such as Launchpad, Mission Control, and AirDrop. Many of these features will make the big glass touchpad even more useful, as Apple's intention was to bring the iPad's and iPhone's touch experience to the Mac. Of course, there's a lot more to OS X Lion than multi-touch gestures.
It has been excruciating painful to see every other major PC manufacturer move to Intel's Core technology while Apple continued to use the dated Core 2 Duos, so it's a relief to say that the Airs' biggest improvements come from within its aluminum shell. Both Airs get a low volt Core i5 processor; the 11-inch's (1.6GHz) is clocked slightly lower than that of the 13-inch (1.7GHz). These are same processors that Intel claims will drive the Ultrabook market and can already be found in the Samsung Series 9 and Asus UX21. Three of the four Air configurations will standardize on 4GB of DDR3 memory (The entry level version of the Air 11-inch will still start at 2GB).
Like the MacBook Pros, the Airs bid farewell to nVidia's integrated graphics environment (the GeForce 320M), opting instead for Sandy Bridge graphics.
The good news is that most of the improvements didn't change pricing: The 11-inch starts at $999 with the Core i5 processor, 2GB of memory, and 64GB of flash storage, while the $1,199 configuration bumps RAM and storage capacities to 4GB and 128GB, respectively. The 13-inch, as with previous models, will sell for $1,299 and $1,599.