Apple has officially announced today that in two weeks time, its MacBook Air along with accompaniments, and its Time Capsule will be available in India at an Apple store near you.
The MacBook Air has been talked and written about recurrently ever since it was announced by Apple Chief, Steve Jobs, at the MacWorld 2008. The slimmest (no, thinnest) notebook in the world, as Jobs described it, measures just 0.76-inches at its thickest, and a mere 0.16-inches at its thinnest.
According to Apple, the notebook is essentially for the Mac-user on-the-move. This is where its portability and wireless convenience come into play. The Silver Matte colored MacBook Air features a 13.3-inches LED back-lit wide-screen display; if you care about nature, you must know that it's Mercury-free. The MacBook Air features Intel Core 2 Duo processor and Intel 965GMS chipset with integrated Gfx using a new miniaturized package technology.
It also features a 4,200rpm 1.8-inches hard disk drive with 80GB standard storage capacity, and 2GB RAM. The MacBook Air has a built-in iSight Web cam, and a track-pad instead of the conventional touch-pad that works on a platform similar to that of the iPhone or iPod Touch. While the petite frame of the notebook has been appreciated worldwide, its overall configuration has gathered mixed reactions. Which is primarily due to the fact that it gives the conventional optical drive a miss; the Firewire, Ethernet, media card reader, and expansion card slot are also absent from the notebook.
Besides, there's only one USB port included in the MacBook Air. For the missing optical drive, Apple has reassuringly provided consumers with an option to use the MacBook Air SuperDrive, which would be available at an additional cost of Rs 5,500.
For those who do not want to purchase the SuperDrive for their MacBook Air; they can use Apple's software feature on the notebook called Remote Disk. The feature enables you to "borrow" the optical drive of another Mac or PC on the same network as the MacBook Air. Apple's MacBook Air is priced at Rs 96,100. It comes with a limited one-year warranty, on completion of which, additional support-warranty can be purchased from the company.
The other big launch, the Time Capsule, is an automatic data back-up solution that works over a wireless network. It can work as a wireless hard drive for both, the Mac and the PC. On the Leopard operating system (OS), it works like a wireless hard drive that works in sync with Apple's in-house software, Time Machine. It also helps find lost files and restore all of Apple's software.
Time Capsule is a full Airport Extreme base station with 802.11n wireless and four Ethernet ports, plus server grade hard drives to back-up multiple Macs over a network. Apple's Time Capsule will be available in two capacities: 500GB at a price tag of Rs 16,700, and 1TB for Rs 27,200.
No doubt these devices from Apple are considered ground-breaking. But keeping the Indian consumer in mind, the wireless factor in the MacBook Air will surely take some time to get absorbed.
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