Apple MacBook Air Notebooks Feature iLife ’11, OS X Lion

Apple MacBook Air Two new versions of the Apple MacBook Air are now available, an 11-inch model with an 11.6-inch, high-resolution LED-backlit display and a 13-inch version with a 13.3-inch display. The former begins at $999, and the latter at $1,199.

Thin, Light and Tough The MacBook Air notebooks measure 0.68 inches at their thickest point and 0.11 inches at their thinnest. They weigh 2.3 pounds and 2.9 pounds and feature unibody aluminum construction, for durability, and glass displays and Multi-Touch track pads. Despite using more rigorous testing than in the past, Apple promises 7 hours of battery life for the 13-inch model and 5 hours for the 11-incher.

Mac Technology The voice-over in Apple’s newest ad calmly intones: “Everything we’ve learned has come down to this.” Apple CEO Steve Jobs explained at the Apple event, titled “Back to the Mac,” that Mac technology informed the creation of the iPhone, which informed the iPad. Now Apple engineers have taken the innovations and lessons of those two and put them into its best Macs yet.

iLife ’11 The new MacBook Air will feature the iLife ’11 suite of applications, which offers full-screen views in iPhoto and tools in iMovie for making theatrical trailers for home videos. For the music options accompanying the trailers, Apple went to the Abbey Road Studios and recorded the London Symphony Orchestra.

Apple iPhoto In iLife ’11’s iPhoto, users can create print projects-books that the software will help you lay out and design, and that will later arrive in the mail.

Letterpress Cards Also new to iPhoto in iLife ’11 is the ability to make your own letterpress cards. Users can design cards with their digital photos, instantly send their creations to a press that stamps them out, and the high-end cards will later arrive in the mail.

Garage Band In addition to updates to iPhoto and iMovie, Garage Band was updated. One new feature, Groove Matching, which enables an editor to tweak and better coordinate individual instrument performances, was likened by a member of the Apple staff to “an automatic spell checker for bad rhythm.”

Apple OS X Lion The eighth incarnation of the Apple operating system, Lion, will arrive in the summer of 2011. Its features include the Mac App Store, which will launch with Snow Leopard; a Launchpad space for apps, which acts like the home screen of an iPhone; system-wide support for full-screen apps; and Mission Control, a way of viewing and interacting with everything running on the Mac.

FaceTime for Mac Jobs also announced that a beta version of a FaceTime for Mac app is available immediately. Now, Mac users can video chat with iPhone 4 and iPod touch users. Jobs said the app was super easy. “There’s nothing to set up, nothing to configure,” he said.