Isaiah's Tech

At Apple's "Back to the Mac" event today, they introduced something that we knew was coming. Yes, the MacBook Air is now official and there are two models! The first model will be just 0.68-inches thick and 2.9 pounds so it's definitely portable. It's sporting the good ol' unibody construction so it'll be quite durable. The first model they introduced features a 13.3-inch LED-backlit display (1,440 x 900 resolution), a 1.86GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, Nvidia GeForce 320m GPU, a full-sized keyboard, a multitouch trackpad, a built-in webcam (for FaceTime / iChat), 2GB of RAM, WiFi 802.11n support, and, of course, doesn't have an optical drive. It has instant-on connectivity along with 7 hours of real-time battery life and 30 days of standby.

Apple also went on to introduce the 11.6-inch MacBook Air and this one's just 2.3 pounds. It has a smaller footprint with the same unibody design so this one's even more portable. The specs are just about the exact same for this notebook except the LED-backlit display sports a smaller 1,366 x 768 resolution, the C2D CPU inside is clocked at just 1.4GHz, and the battery will last just 5 hours in the real world (still 30 days of standby time though). They're both available right now! Prices are below, those are flash storage options by the way. No hard drives inside of these.

They've also given us a sneak peek at their next version of Max OS X and it'll be called Lion. "Mac OS X meets the iPad" they say. This new version will have multitouch capabilities (on screen), the App Store, a Launchpad (gives you a grid of all of your apps - like the iPad), and things that you'd naturally find in iOS. It really brings the best of both worlds (including Expose and Spaces), so this is actually looking pretty good right now. Look out for touchscreen MacBook's and iMac's next year. Mac OS X Lion will be available in the Summer of next year. And in 90 days the App Store for Mac will be available, yes, on Snow Leopard!

At the event Apple also introduced iLife 11, but you can always read about that somewhere else because it wasn't all that exciting to be honest. iLife 11 is available right now and comes free with every new Mac; you'll also be able to upgrade for $49 if you're interested. Furthermore, they've also introduced FaceTime for the Mac, so that's a pretty big step. FaceTime should be integrated with iChat which would make a bit more sense, but it's not. It's available right now in beta form.

[Engadget]