Apple's MacBook Air

Apple has officially announced that in two weeks time, its MacBook Air along with accompaniments, and its Time Capsule will be available in India.

The MacBook Air has been talked and written about recurrently ever since it was announced at the MacWorld 2008. The slimmest notebook in the world, measures just 0.76-inches at its thickest, and a mere 0.16-inches at its thinnest. The Silver Matte colored MacBook Air features a 13.3-inches LED back-lit wide-screen display.

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. Not bad at all.

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.Though it is the thinnest notebook, it has major shortcomings, this 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. This could prove to be very inconvenient as most people now tend to connect their cell phones and other external peripherals like an external mouse to their laptops while on the move.

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. This is the similar kind of marketing strategy that Sony adopts. It introduces amazing cameras or MP3 players and other cool stuff and makes them slightly complicated and incompatible with others that, they literally force the customer to shell out extra amount to purchase the software or attachments just like the SuperDrive.

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. This is too much of a price taking into consideration the various other models available in the market with similar or better features from companies like Sony, Dell, HP etc. At 96000, each member family can have their own personal laptops. Only an apple fanatic will think of purchasing it. The MAC OS is amazing to work on.

The Time Capsule I feel is the most practical launch by Apple. It 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.

A better pricing strategy by Apple could just boost its presence in the Indian market. The iPod has become a necessity for everyone and its popularity can be attributed to the various models available in terms of the memory capacity, screen size etc. If Apple can do something like this with the MacBook as well, nothing will ever be able to compete with it.