Apple Introduces MacBook AirApple Introduces MacBook Air

It's a notebook! Apple ended weeks of speculation about what Steve Jobs would announce at Macworld Expo with this morning's introduction of "the world's thinnest notebook."The new MacBook Air is 0.76" thick at the back and 0.16" thick at the front--Jobs pointed out that its thickest side is still thinner than the thinnest part of the Sony Vaio TX he was using for comparison. It's got a 13.3" screen, an Intel Core 2 Duo chip, 2GB RAM standard, an 80GB hard disk standard (64GB solid state disk optional), a full-size backlit keyboard, and a trackpad with extensive multitouch gesture recognition. Note the lack of an optical drive: that's part of its Air-ness--it's meant to replace discs with its built-in wireless functions, including being able to install software from a nearby Mac or PC. It weighs 3 pounds, costs $1,799, and will be available in two weeks.

Other announcements of interest to small businesses included new functions for the iPhone and the iPod Touch, such as added mapping capabilities with WiFi hotspot locator. If you have one, you probably already know about them, because they're available as a free software upgrade starting today. And Time Capsule is a wireless-enabled hard disk (500 GB for $200, 1 TB for $499) that is intended to work with Leopard's Time Machine to back up your data wirelessly. But with Gigabit Ethernet and USB ports, it also works as a 802.11n WiFi base station.