MacBook Air Announced During Steve Jobs Keynote in Macworld 2008

"There's something in the air," was Macworld's tagline which has sparked numerous assumptions and speculations. Well, the ultra-thin MacBook is speculation no more. In his keynote earlier in Macworld 2008, Steve Jobs presented the world's thinnest notebook -- MacBook Air. Said notebook is so thin, it can fit inside a manila envelope (and it looks like a silver cracker).

It seems like going green is the theme this year what with Apple taking pains to ensure MacBook Air is environmentally friendly. The casing is made of aluminum with a 13.3-in. mercury-free glass display. The notebook, which is a whopping 56% thinner than MacBook Pro, has a tapering width which ranges from 0.76-0.16 inches -- the largest end of the measure still being thinner than the thinnest part of ordinary laptops.

MacBook Air has black full-sized keyboard, LED backlit screen, built-in iSight camera and a trackpad which has multi-touch gesture support. By that it means you can set different gestures to correspond to different commands (scroll, zoom, delete, etc.). The Air uses Intel Core 2 Duo processors which has been shrinked down to 60% from its original size to fit inside the MacBook Air. According Intel's CEO, Paul Otellini, "The CPU is the width of a dime, the thickness of a nickel, and we didn’t think we could do it." They did.

The Air sports 1.8-in hard drives, USD 2.0, microDVI port and headphone jacks. It has Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR and 802.11n WiFi connectivity. What's missing with the MacBook Air? An optical drive. BUT, you can buy a separate bus-powered drive worth US$99. Apple also has a new software called "Remote Disc" which lets you connect to others computers' drives, even PCs. You get 5 hours of battery life when you're actively surfing the internet with the MacBook Air.

It will start shipping in two weeks' time and is available now for preorder for US$1799. Would you buy a MacBook Air? Oh, I definitely would.