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MacBook Air Unboxing Photos and Wireless Booting

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The first unboxing photos for the MacBook Air come from what appears to be a remote Macworld Expo presentation in Japan. The pictures show that they received their demonstration MacBook Air in the retail packaging. Unboxing sequence: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Meanwhile, Macfixit confirms that the MacBook Air is the first Mac to be able to boot wirelessly.

When Apple introduced the MacBook Air, they detailed a new feature called "Remote Disc" which makes up for the lack of a standard optical drive in the MacBook Air. Remote Disc allows the MacBook Air to wirelessly use a PC or Mac optical drive as if it were its own. Included with this functionality is the ability for the MacBook Air to wirelessly boot off of a Remote Disc shared drive. This means that if your MacBook Air requires an emergency boot or fresh reinstall, it can be done without the $99 external SuperDrive.

This added functionality required changes in the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) and is not presently available on other Macs.

The MacBook Air will be shipping to customers in the next two weeks. A discussion thread has been created for readers waiting for their MacBook Air to ship.

Update: We've been told that Mac OS X 10.5.2 will bring wireless booting sharing to all Macs. (Addendum: It seems wireless booting will require a firmware update.)

Article Link: MacBook Air Unboxing Photos and Wireless Booting
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2008/01/21/macbook-air-unboxing-photos-and-wireless-booting/
Despite all the negative comments washing around this place about the MBA, that is an incredible machine.
 
sunfast said:
Despite all the negative comments washing around this place about the MBA, that is an incredible machine.
Click to expand...

And those negative comments all boil down to the same thing:

Some people want a 12" or 13" MacBook Pro.

The only time the words "Pro" and 13" should appear in the same sentence is on the cover of a porn DVD.
 
Wireless booting answers, IMO, what was the only unanswered question in my mind.

This is a great addition to the MacBook line!

Is the MBA for everyone? Of course not. But for what the MBA does, its pretty amazing.
 
RBMaraman said:
The only time the words "Pro" and 13" should appear in the same sentence is on the cover of a porn DVD.
Click to expand...

That's genius 🙂

Putting my serious hat on, my ideal machine would be an MB with some "pro" styling cues - essentially the same but in Aluminium (fed up of having a piss yellow laptop) with the snazzy keyboard. But I'm fully aware that won't happen.

Still, MacBoor Air isn't it? Lovely.
 
Wonderful, beautiful machine which is relatively unusable and unsuited for 99% of Mac users.

But, they will sell a ton of them to the other 1%.

Not even tempted personally.
 
I am just waiting for somebody to post a video of the unboxing, the pictures make it look absolutely awesome.
 
Now that's one sexy dumb terminal!

Setting it next to another "thin" computer really shows how incredibly thin this thing is. Love it!
 
Bosunsfate said:
Wireless booting answers, IMO, what was the only unanswered question in my mind.
Click to expand...

Personally i thought it was pretty obvious that it would wirelessly boot! How else do they expect you to clean install or access disk utility functions from the Leopard DVD!

I think steve (or the website) would have made a point that you require the external drive to do such a task.
 
Still more of an "amazing piece of engineering" than "something I'd buy" but A++ on the wireless booting, solves that problem, very nice.
 
wireless booting i must say is rather impressive. i'm assuming other random programs can be installed in a similar fashion. what about external hard drives?
 
QuarterSwede said:
Now that's one sexy dumb terminal!

Setting it next to another "thin" computer really shows how incredibly thin this thing is. Love it!
Click to expand...

Yeah, it was difficult to fully imagine how MBA's size compared to the competition. Those pictures are shocking - so much thinner!
Not that I am in the market, per se, but I do look forward to seeing these in stores. I bet they'll be even more impressive in person.

That said, this product didn't give me that "crap - I want that now" or "I didn't know I wanted that, until now" feeling Apple has often given me. Sure, it's super thin and has some neat things like Wireless Booting and a more gestured track pad. But at the end of the day, it's still a clamsheel laptop - only thinner.
I think I might be ready for a different take on the whole personal computing thing and have begun to wonder if a tablet, done right, would fit my needs/desires.

Maybe we'll see sooner than later.
Maybe not.

?
 
It will be interesting to see some performance tests.

I wonder how slow this thing will be with the 4200 rpm drive. I also wonder how well the wireless DVD actually works.

Whenever I use a network drive it always seems dog slow compared to a local drive. I can even see a big difference between wired gigabit ethernet and wireless N for network drives.

Personally I would not buy one of these but I am curious as to how well they will actually perform.

As an aside, does anyone use idisk on .mac for uploading large files >200mb. Why is it always so dog slow and why do most of my attempts fail? I really wish Apple would fix .mac now that the wireless macbook air is here. It would be a good way to store additional data for the Air, rather than take up space on the small 80gb drive.
 
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