The guys at Shanzai have made a MacBook Air inspired notebook of 11 inches, but although it looks like Apple's sleek 13 incher, it is not just a smaller clone. The hardware has been scaled down to netbook levels, but to compensate it offers some of the functions many MacBook air owners might be lusting for.
According to Shanzai, the Macbook Air suffers from the following problems:
- No Ethernet port (not included so as to reduce thickness)
- Only a single USB, tucked away under a lid which can be annoying for certain peripherals.
- No Firewire port = forget all about using an external Firewire hard drive, as well as transferring photos from your digital camera.
- Irremoveable battery, pretty annoying as batteries lose capacity over time.
The above issues have inspired Shanzai to create a product with the aesthethic advantages of the MacBook Air, but with different hardware and extra features. These include:
- A "full metal jacket", supposedly to make it more rigid and easier to cool.
- An 11 inch frameless display, rather than MacBook Air's 13.3 inch one, supposedly to increase mobility. Sure it does improve mobility, but then you get, well, a smaller display which is not always preferable.
- 2x USB ports, 1x RJ-45 port (Ethernet LAN), a card reader, a removeable battery and a PCI-e slot reserved for a 3G module. Pretty nice features that you do not get on the MacBook Air.
Other than that the machine is based on an Intel Atom processor (1.6GHz, so it is probably the N270), has 1GB DDR2 RAM, a 160GB hard drive and a display resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels. Classic netbooks specs that pale slightly when compared to - especially the revised - MacBook Air.
The unnamed clone is slightly lighter than the MacBook Air with a weight of 1.33kg against 1.36kg, but thicker with 25mm against 19.4mm. The price will be $290 - you will never find a notebook from Apple at that price - and it will supposedly be launched sometime in September.
Source: Shanzai
Add your comments
in Hardware & Accessories by MaryTenderLOS, 01-12-11 09:20