MacBook Air blows out the cobwebs

By Matthew Elliott on 15 October 2008, 11:24am

The MacBook Air has already benefited from Apple's new chassis technology, so it didn't receive much of an upgrade last night. Physically, the new model is the same as the original Air, but Apple has squeezed a mini DisplayPort connection under the flap that hides the lone USB port and headphone jack.

As with the MacBook and MacBook Pro refreshes, the new MacBook Air ditches the Intel chipset for Nvidia and features integrated GeForce 9400M graphics. It also increases the front-side bus from 800MHz to 1,066MHz, while keeping the Core 2 Duo processor offerings roughly the same, though the chips' L2 cache increases from 4MB to 6MB.

The default memory is 2GB and you still can't upgrade beyond that, but it's now of the DDR3 variety. A 120GB (4200rpm) hard drive replaces the old 80GB unit, and a 128GB solid-state drive replaces the previous 64GB SSD offering.

The price of the lower-end Air has gone up £100 to £1,299, although Apple has brought the price of the higher-end model down to a still pricey £1,799. That equates to about, oh, six netbooks. -Matthew Elliott