Don's shelter: revolutionary, untra-sexy, extreme beauty

disclaimer: this post uses a lot of materials from the Apple website: www.apple.com

You may ask, why do you post such a title huh Don?

Ok. Because of THIS:

Isn't that AWESOME? A notebook that can fit in an A4 envelope?

And that's not a myth, that's a REAL notebook, a new product from Apple.

Introducing to you, the new MacBook AIR.

Elegant. Classy. Graceful. Breath-taking. AWESOME.

Ok. Enough with all the awing from me. I'll start to tell you more about it.

Firstly, it's much more eco-friendly than any other laptop. MacBook Air embodies Apple’s continuing environmental progress. It consumes the least amount of power of any Mac and is also designed with the following features to reduce environmental impact:

. Highly recyclable aluminum enclosure
. Mercury-free LCD display with arsenic-free glass
. PVC-free internal cables
. Largely recyclable, low-volume packaging

well, you can actually use those examples for the Environment-themed essays of GP. haha.

Size-and-weight wise, it's thin, it's light, think Kate Moss in a sleek, sturdy anodized aluminum suit.

Height: 0.16-0.76 inch (0.4-1.94 cm)
Width: 12.8 inches (32.5 cm)
Depth: 8.94 inches (22.7 cm)
Weight: 3.0 pounds (1.36 kg)

It's the most portable notebook ever, it's so much lighter than the files we drag to school right? It's called MacBook Air for a reason.

Another breath-taking feature of the MacBook Air is the classy full-size, full-feature keyboard.
The keyboard is full-size with crisp keys just like the ones on MacBook. But MacBook Air goes further by adding backlit key illumination, making it easy to work in low-light settings such as airplanes and conference halls. A built-in ambient light sensor automatically adjusts keyboard and display brightness for optimal visibility. And with the oversize multi-touch trackpad, it just keeps getting better for fingers.

Have I just mentioned the multi-touch trackpad? Yes. A ha. That one is brilliantly brilliant. Just imagine the trackpad on your laptop become the surface of an iPhone or an iPod Touch.
You can pinch, swipe, or rotate to zoom in on text, advance through a photo album, or adjust an image. This gesture-based input so successful on iPhone and iPod touch now comes to MacBook.

The backlit LED display allows for an even thinner build. It provides instant full-screen brightness the moment you open MacBook Air. The mercury- and arsenic-free display is also more power efficient, which translates to longer battery life.

It's quite expansive. MacBook Air comes with a way-more-than-generous 2GB of RAM built in — ample memory for working with your favorite applications. The 80GB hard drive provides plenty of storage space, the type of hard drive used for your iPods. And you have the option to upgrade to a 64GB solid-state drive, which has no moving parts for enhanced durability.

MacBook Air performance is as impressive as its form, thanks to its 1.6GHz or 1.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. This chip was custom-built to fit within the compact dimensions of MacBook Air.

And my favorite feature is included as well, the iSight camera. It’s so smartly integrated that you hardly notice it’s there. The iSight camera and iChat software make video chatting really easy as long as a wireless network is available. I haven't tried the iChat though. All I have done so far with the iSight camera is taking crazy shots on Photobooth ^^.

Well, with this super thin MacBook, the battery must be very thin as well, and actually its battery is the thinnest from Apple. Despite the size, its promised performance is impressive, you can access the web wirelessly for five full hours.

A MAJOR feature of the MacBook Air is the wireless, which is crucial for this notebook as it is designed for a fully wireless lifestyle. I mean, that's what the small size and the portability is for, isn't it! It has the fastest-available, next-generation 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR built in. And that’s just the beginning of the unprecedented wireless capabilities of MacBook Air.

AND SURPRISE, it has no optical drive (a.k.a. the DVD/CD drive). Again, that’s because MacBook Air is built for the wireless world. So instead of watching DVDs, you can rent movies wirelessly from the iTunes Store. And instead of backing up files to a stack of discs, you can back up files wirelessly using Apple’s new Time Capsule.

and this is, according to me, the revolutionary feature: the Remote Disc
the Remote Disc lets you wirelessly use or “borrow” the optical drive of a Mac or PC in the vicinity. So you can have full access to an optical drive without having to haul one around. In another word, any CD/DVD drive around you can become your MacBook Air's CD drive easily. I think that's extremely smart and innovative.

In case if you still insist on using an optical drive, it has a portable optical drive for you as well, connected easily to your laptop via the USB port. Piece of cake.

A companion of MacBook Air is the Time Capsule. Mac OS X Leopard brought you Time Machine, the built-in backup that automatically copies files to an external drive. And now, Time Capsule — the new hard drive plus Wi-Fi base station — lets you use Time Machine to wirelessly back up your files. It’s effort free and yet another way MacBook Air lets you live and work untethered. In short, it's your MacBook Air's wireless hard drive, which can store from 500 GB to 1 TB.