No sooner do I post an article speculating on a completely wireless laptop than does Wired's Gadget Lab post a story regarding the "MacBook Air".
According to their "source", the Air "will be a purely wireless device, relying solely on Wi-Fi or other wireless technology for its connectivity — hence the "Air" moniker."
Check out the artist's rendering after the jump.
While not bad conceptually, I'd expect the round "hinge" at the back to be a bit larger as that pretty much has to be the battery compartment.
Note the design similarities to the new Apple wireless keyboard.
From a more practical standpoint the concept has a few issues, the first of which are the Apple keyboard-style keys sticking up from the base and which would bash into the screen when closed. Now, if you had more room you could recess the screen, or lower the keyboard, but in something this thin that's not practical.
But what if you don't care if the keys hit the screen? Cover it in iPhone-like scratch-resistant glass, and simply let the keys depress into the keyboard when closed.
Over on Gizmodo, the discussion has centered around the lack of ethernet ports and the lack of a drive, both of which I also covered earlier in the Wireless MacBook.
Just offload them onto an external unit that also functions as a dock.
Or, do as they did when they dropped the built-in modem, just make an ethernet connector available as a USB-based dongle.
In fact, there's already some evidence to support that the driver for this already exists.
Finally, a rumor site [sic] indicated that this was all true, by registering macbookair.com and pointing it to the following URL at Apple:
http://www.apple.com/?Will+We+see+a+MacBookAir+on+Tuesday?
But, you see, anything after a question mark in a URL is passed as a parameter to the page. So "Will+We+see+a+MacBookAir+on+Tuesday" is just junk being passed in and ignored by the Apple site. As proof check out the following link:
http://www.apple.com/?isights+to+be+sole+official+apple+weblog
Which, by the same logic, is apparently is being announced as well.
Mom would be so proud.
[via Wired]
Related Articles:
- The Wireless MacBook
- The MacBook Air: An Ultra-Portable Concept
- The MacBook Air: The AT&T Connection
- Want A Small Thin Light Notebook? Here's How.
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