Linky to the Register

It's not even close to a balanced article but it's worth it just for the piccies.

Total and utter engineering porn. What a machine!

[Edit:] My geekgasm distracted me from posting the link to the full undressing

http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Air-11-Inch-Model-A1370-Teardown/3745/1

I'm glad it's not just me then.
That's what I love about Apple kit - you're not really meant to see the insides of the Air (apparently) but they still make it look gorgeous.

Given the screws they're using to hold it together, I don't think there's any 'apparently' about it.

You have to love the El Reg comments threads. I bet they all drive kit cars too...


Jon

And it all works as well.

I had a play with one at the Apple store. Interesting looking bit of kit - not sure I like the wedge shape but the screen is quite nice. It's not for me however and with the price the way it is and the CPU a mere 1.4ghz, I'd rather go for the 13" Macbook Pro instead.

If it had a backlit keyboard I would be very very tempted.

Anybody found any really negative reviews of it yet?

I cannot help but feel I'm missing something with this, given the cost of the base spec and the cost of equivalently specced Windows machines. I am aware one normally pays a little bit extra for Mac products, but the 11inch models seem to be twice the price of the equivalent Windows boxes. Is that really just on how thin they are making the machine, or is there something else?

Nope, not a single one. I think that's partly because the Airs have particular appeal to journalists, whose needs are well served by a small, light, laptop with good battery life and full sized keyboard, and whose principal activity (that's writing, not drinking...) isn't taxing on a relatively low-spec machine; if your working day involves heavy image manipulation, say, then I wouldn't have thought they would hold much appeal, techno-lust aside.

I think price comparisons to the MacBook Pros are a little unrealistic without taking the SSD into account - spec up an MBP with one and the prices aren't so close - and the reviews that I've read suggest the SSD and decent graphics make them far snappier machines than their spec suggests; I had a very quick play with one in my local Apple store yesterday and it certainly didn't feel any slower than my MBP for general email/browsing/writing/iPhoto tasks <shrug>

Pete

Really? Please provide me with a link to any machine with similar specs, form factor, and engineering. Any equivalent Windows machine I have found which has a similar form factor to a MAc has an equivalent or more expensive price. Engineering costs!

I think that was what I was asking. There are tons of netbooks out there with pretty similar hardware specs that cost a lot less, they're just notably more chunky. Thing with a lot of apple kit is once you add in the usual plethora of Firewire, bluetooth and other ports they come out pretty reasonably against Windows boxes. Understandably there aren't that many of them on the Airs, I was just asking if the price difference was all down to the form-factor / engineering or whether there were also some features that I'd missed. Don't think I'm a Mac hater by any stretch, I've always thought the Air series was what notebooks should be about, especially from a hardware perspective.

I think a lot of the price difference can be laid at the door of the SSD, with the unibody aluminium engineering not helping.

Both those things together, though, must make for an almost indestructible laptop.

I think that the unibody case adds quite a bit to the cost, but does make it stronger and lighter. I suspect that there are no other unibody computers of a similar size. Dell do something reasonably similar but with a plastic case which is hardly comparable.

Well, I bought one.

PioDH!

Mark

Nice.

PoiDH!