MacBook Air 2010: The Next Generation of Macbooks

If you have an iPod, iPhone, or iPad, you’re already taking advantage of all that flash storage has to offer: reliability, speed, and efficiency. So the decision to use flash storage in an ultracompact notebook like MacBook Air makes perfect sense. Flash allows you to access data quickly, and it gives MacBook Air the astonishing ability to remain in standby mode for up to 30 days.1 Which means your MacBook Air snaps to in an instant, whether you open it tomorrow, next week, or next month.

The new MacBook Air includes a spacious Multi-Touch trackpad with a buttonless design, so you can click anywhere. The Multi-Touch trackpad also lets you pinch, swipe, or rotate to adjust an image, zoom in on text, or advance through a photo album. Try the four-finger swipe, swiping up or down to use Exposé and swiping left or right to switch among active applications. Or perform the new three-finger drag to move your windows from one place to another.

Since space-saving flash storage leaves room for a bigger battery, you can devote more time to the things you enjoy most. Things like browsing the web, editing photos, and watching videos. Get up to 5 hours of battery life on a single charge on the 11-inch model and up to 7 hours on the 13-inch model. Put MacBook Air to sleep, and it enters standby mode to conserve battery life for up to 30 days.¹ When you come back to your MacBook Air and open it up, it’s on in an instant. So you’re free to go off the grid knowing you’re still on a charge.

Corner to corner and pixel by pixel, the display on the new MacBook Air is both an engineering feat and a design breakthrough. It measures a mere 4.86 millimeters (0.19 inch) thin, yet the resolution is so high, you’ll feel like you’re looking at a much larger screen. And with good reason. The 11-inch MacBook Air features a widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio and a resolution greater than that of a typical 13-inch notebook, while the 13-inch MacBook Air wows with a resolution equivalent to a typical 15-inch notebook.

Hidden inside the wafer-thin MacBook Air display is another engineering achievement — the FaceTime camera. It’s so thin (even thinner than the camera on iPhone 4) you barely notice it, but it’s incredibly capable. Using the new FaceTime for Mac application, currently in beta, you can make FaceTime calls over Wi-Fi with anyone who has a Mac, an iPhone 4, or the new iPod touch. And the video quality is so good, you can even chat in low-light conditions. Learn more about FaceTime for Mac

Despite its compact form, MacBook Air delivers full stereo sound. Space-efficient design inside the enclosure allows for the placement of left and right speakers that project sound through the keyboard. So you’re able to enjoy a richer audio experience while chatting online, watching TV shows, listening to music, or playing games.

MacBook Air features the NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics processor — the same one used in the 13-inch MacBook Pro. With a performance boost of over 2x that of the previous-generation MacBook Air, the NVIDIA graphics processor provides outstanding speed and power for browsing photos, watching movies, or playing games. It also makes all the everyday things you do on MacBook Air — like writing email and surfing the web — fast and energy efficient.

MacBook Air weighs less than three pounds, but it’s a heavyweight where it counts. Intel Core 2 Duo processors get the work done fast. So you can be every bit as productive on MacBook Air — but in more places. Live-blog the event of the year straight from the convention floor. Perfect your sales-winning presentation from the airport terminal. Cite references down to a T from the library stacks. MacBook Air lets you do everything you need to do whenever and wherever it needs to be done.

To be truly mobile, you need to go wireless. That’s why MacBook Air features 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR. Wireless connectivity allows you to browse the web, send email, and print documents.3 It also lets you download music, videos, and — coming soon with the Mac App Store — applications. No matter where you are. MacBook Air has you covered when you’re staying in one place for a while, too. Two USB 2.0 ports, an SD card slot (on the 13-inch model), and a headphone minijack give you plenty of options. And a Mini DisplayPort connects to a 27-inch Apple LED Cinema Display, projector, or HDTV for those times when you’re looking to broaden your desktop horizon.