(12 February 2008 6:00 pm)

MUMBAI: Apple has launched MacBook Air in India, claiming this to be the world’s thinnest notebook.

The Macbook Air costs a little less than Rs 100,000.

MacBook Air measures 0.16-inches at its thinnest point, while its maximum height of 0.76-inches is less than the thinnest point on competing notebooks, says the company.

MacBook Air has a 13.3-inch LED-backlit widescreen display, a full-size and backlit keyboard, a built-in iSight video camera for video conferencing, and a trackpad with multi-touch gesture support so that users can pinch, rotate and swipe.

The company says that MacBook Air is powered by a 1.6 GHz or 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 4MB L2 cache, and includes as standard features 2GB of memory, an 80GB 1.8-inch hard drive, and the latest 802.11n Wi-Fi technology and Bluetooth 2.1.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs says, “We’ve built the world’s thinnest notebook—without sacrificing a full-size keyboard or a full-size 13-inch display. When you first see MacBook Air, it’s hard to believe it’s a high-performance notebook with a full-size keyboard and display. But it is.”

MacBook Air has a 13.3-inch LED-backlit widescreen display that is energy efficient, and its spacious trackpad offers multi-touch gesture support for pinch, rotate and swipe, making it more intuitive than ever to browse and rotate photos or zoom into web pages in Safari.

MacBook Air features a full-size keyboard design. It delivers up to five hours of battery life for wireless productivity and includes AirPort Extreme 802.11n Wi-Fi networking, which delivers up to five times the performance and twice the range of 802.11g. Apple’s Migration Assistant software now enables users to quickly transfer files, applications and preferences from your old Mac® to MacBook Air right over your wireless network.

The MacBook Air SuperDrive is powered by MacBook Air’s USB port, eliminating the need to carry a separate power adapter. MacBook Air users can wirelessly backup files with Time Capsule. Time Capsule is a backup appliance that automatically and wirelessly backs up everything including digital media files like photos.

Jobs adds, “Bring Time Capsule home, plug it in, click a few buttons on your Macs and voila—all the Macs in your house are being backed up automatically, every hour of every day. With Time Capsule and Time Machine, all your irreplaceable photos, movies and documents are automatically protected and incredibly easy to retrieve if they are ever lost.”

Time Capsule lets users wirelessly back up all of the data on their Macs, find lost files and even restore all of their software. In the event of a file being lost, users can wirelessly search back through time to find deleted files, applications, photos and other digital media and then instantly restore it. If it’s ever necessary, Leopard can also easily restore an
entire system from the Time Machine backup on Time Capsule.