The New MacBook Air

I don’t think Jobs was exaggerating when he said this is the direction in which all MacBooks are heading. Thinner, lighter, longer battery life — in large part due to the use of flash storage. The only thing holding up moving to flash storage across the line is the price. As soon as it becomes relatively cheap to include 256 GB of Flash storage (and relatively reasonable to put in 512 GB), hard disks will disappear from MacBooks.

Optical drives are on the way out, too. Note, for example, that Apple is shipping the OS restore disk as a USB flash drive with the new Airs.

★ Wednesday, 20 October 2010