Apple unveils the 'future of notebooks'

Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the company's latest high-end ultra-thin MacBook Air laptop models at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California, on October 20.

The new MacBook Air -- introduced with Jobs' signature "one last thing" set-up -- is designed to reproduce the versatility of popular devices such as the iPhone and iPad, and will incorporate FaceTime video chats, which Apple is bringing to all its Macs.

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At its thickest point it is .68 inches, at thinnest .11 inches, and weighs 2.9 pounds.

The complete unibody aluminum construction houses a 13.3-inch LED backlit with 1440 x 900 resolution.

There's no optical hard drive -- flash provides instant on and up to 2X faster speeds.

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Battery life on the new MBA is 7 hours on wireless Web. (The last-generation models were rated at 5 hours.)

It has a standby time of 30 days.

There are two USB ports, instead of just the one on the last models, and there's an SD card reader.

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The computers are available immediately and cost $999 to $1,599, depending upon the size of the screen and the amount of storage.

The first MacBook Air sold for more than $2,000.

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The CPUs are Intel s Core 2 Duo across the board with the 11-inch model getting clocked at 1.4GHz and the 13-inch model getting a 1.86GHz.

2GB DDR3 memory is standard on all models as is NVIDIA s GeForce 320M graphics processor.

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