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Macworld: The MacBook Air Hands-On

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Apple’s thinnest ever laptop, La Cie’s smallest ever drive and FileMaker’s simplest ever database.

La Cie Shrinks Hard Drives to Flash Size

lacie 40gb disk

The cap clips off to reveal a USB connector, making it look like a chunky USB flash stick, but the connector is on an extension cord, so it doesn’t take up too much space on the side of your notebook. The 40GB Little Drive is $160, the 30GB version $130 and both are considerably cheaper than a 32GB flash stick like the new $229 Corsair Flash Voyager.

11 Comments Comment from the forums
  • mbmcavoy 19 January 2008 02:20
    "For an additional $1,300, Apple offers a 64GB SSD instead of the standard 80GB HDD."

    $1,300 will get you both the SSD and the faster processor. The SSD alone is "only" $1000. Yes, even Steve Jobs calls it "pricey"!

    My question is, can you use the "remote disk" if you need to re-install the OS?
    Reply
  • 19 January 2008 09:16
    PATA has a burstrate of 100MB/s not 100MBps, big difference.
    Reply
  • 20 January 2008 04:46
    ^^^ What? Dude, you just wrote the exact same thing just in two different ways. The p in MBps means "per." Lo and behold, the slash also means per--same thing...
    Reply
  • 20 January 2008 04:52
    Now, maybe you meant to point out the difference between B and b...but it seems to me like you don't really know what you're talking about.
    Reply
  • 20 January 2008 11:47
    Guess he doesn't know the difference between a bit and a byte.
    Reply
  • jklimes 20 January 2008 16:35
    Hah, this article made me laugh! Please Mary, are you some kind of agriculture expert? Cos IT is not your friend as we can see here. First off, you mention that MBA lacks lot of ports (seems you wrote down all you know of). I agree, but I am not sure any of the other ultraportables has eSata or Fire Wire - and whats that with the VGA? You already have mDVI and if it was the case to connect an older display - adapter is your way. And ethernet over USB is only 100Mbps - well every other joe has a gigabit switch down in his basement. "You can?t crack the case open in a year?s time", maybe not in a years time, can do it tommorow. You can even replace the battery if you will, changing HDD is a minute job. Now you cant add or replace the RAM, that is true. Mind you OS X has pretty neat memory management and 2 Gigs is far enough for anything you throw at it. Except 3D creation and A/V editing - but you wont do that on an ultraportable would you? In case you use MBA during long flights I would suggest flight power adapter. And I cant really remember the last time I ve seen someone with ultraportable carrying two spare extended battery packs around. The part about CPU and HDD is best to be skipped altogether, since you had hard time with numbers and units. Let me tell you just one thing - no 4200 nor 5600 hard drives can utilize SATA theoretical bandwidth, you wont notice any difference between PATA and SATA in this case (like with Raptors using still SATA 1). What is interesting for us - PATA uses less power over the same SATA drive. Finally, the R500 is a fine piece of technology, but 1,2 Ghz ULV and Vista do not like each other very much (tried it myself). Plus 12 inch disp and limited baterry pack give you the impression at whom are R500 and MBA aimed at. To make myself clear, I am not mac addict, nor am I going to buy MBA or any other apple stuff. But the next time you are going to write an article, please make yourself sure you understand the topic quite well.
    Reply
  • cc3d 20 January 2008 20:17
    There is no reason to buy this laptop. He list more things it does NOT have than it does. It's thin and it's light. I guess that's important when you're sitting in Starbucks pretending to update your resume becasue nobody will hire your tree-huggin a$$!
    Reply
  • 21 January 2008 05:35
    LOL. 100MB/s = 100MBps

    Perhaps you meant to say 100Mbps ( notice the lower case b )
    Yes, it changes it by a lot - a factor of 8 really
    fyi - 8bits=1Byte
    Reply
  • rta 21 January 2008 07:42
    why do i just have this urge to bend on in half until it snaps?
    Reply
  • 07 February 2008 01:10
    I have long missed MS Access on mac OSX. This looks promising and I want to know more!
    Reply