At last year's Macworld event, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone; this year he unveiled the Macbook Air. Macbook Air is an ultra-thin laptop that clocks in at under an inch at its thickest point. It comes in two versions: $1,800 lands you a 1.6 GHz, 80 GB model, while $3,100 gets you a faster 1.8 GHz, with a 64 GB solid-state hard drive (a positive innovation when you consider the fact that traditional "moving" hard drives store your data on a spinning aluminum disk that's bound to crap out sooner or later, and, if you don't back up religiously, leave you in the lurch). Due to its thickness, or lack thereof, the Macbook Air cannot accommodate an optical drive for CDs or DVDs: Jobs asserts that this won't be an issue because 1) people will be able to download their software via the internet, 2) Apple plans on producing a $99 external optical drive, and 3) Macbook Air will enable you to access CD/DVD drives on other PCs or Macs you may own.
This last point illustrates precisely the consumer whom the Macbook Air is targeted at: upper class individuals who have a ton of disposable income and probably already own an iPhone, an iMac, a Segway, etc. It's an accessory. Certainly this a charge that could be leveled at previous Apple baubles (the iPhone, which is essentially a glorified BlackBerry with a touchscreen and less functionality), but even those devices offered something tangible by way of a functional innovation. Macbook Air, on the other hand, does what other Macs already do in a more chic package. In fact, apart from the fact that it's super thin, it compares incredibly unfavorably with the cheapest iteration of the Macbook already on the market, which comes standard with a faster processor (2 GHz) and a CD/DVD combo drive all for roughly $1,100. By this metric, the Macbook Air is more a parlor trick designed to squeeze more fawning write-ups out of an obsequious media in the absence of an earth-shattering revelation like last year's iPhone announcement. Yes, the technology that went into making it might lead somewhere new, but the current product is the sizzle without the steak.
There were a couple of other announcements yesterday: iTunes now offers movie rentals, there's a new device called the Time Capsule which doubles as a WiFi station and an external hard drive (500 GB or 1 TB versions available), and couple of software updates for the iPhone and iPod Touch which includes a navigation function that figures position based upon cell towers and WiFi networks - as Salon's Farhad Manjoo put it, "GPS without the GPS." All in all it was a "Zzzz" worthy event, product-wise, which is kind of a backhanded compliment in that it proves that though Steve Jobs may not be God, he faces similar expectations.
