Apple walk on air (again)

Regular readers will know I am a confessed Appleaholic. And with the latest bit of eye-popping innovation (or "thinnovation" as Apple call it), you can see why… so, forgive me. This is the first of a 2-part post on Apple.

The Apple MacBook Air is simply stunning. It’s the thinnest laptop in the world. And even though I already have a MacBook Pro, I’m working on a laptop PC-portfolio strategy that gives me an excuse to buy one.

It all starts with the sausage!
The MacBook Air is another illustration that shows why Apple is not a
lifestyle brand relying on clever marketing, as some people claim.
Sure, it has a deafening amount of emotional sizzle. But this all flows
from a stupendously designed sausage (product):

– Somehow packing a super 13 inch screen, fast processor and full
keyboard into an incredibly light and thin machine. Check out the
comparison with the thinnest laptop until now, sold by Sony:

– I love the way that features from the iPhone have been applied to the MacBook Air. Like the way you can use 2 fingers on the trackpad to "stretch" an image, or swivel it around, rather than having to type in commands

– It is SO light. It has a brilliant "pickupability" appeal: the queue of people checking it out in the Apple store last week all just had to pick it up to see how light it was.

– Just how much innovation went into the MacBook Air is amazing. Intel had to create a brand new processor in order to make the thing as thin as it is. The CEO of Intel came on stage at the Mac Expo launch to talk about it. See the image below with the MacBook Pro chip (on the left) and the new chip (on the right).

Let your product do the talking

The great thing about having such an amazing product is that the job of communication becomes a lot easier. No need to come up with some fancy pants advertising. Just let the product do the talking. What I liked this time was the way Apple came up with a clever device to show just how thin the MacBook Air is: placing it inside an envelope, like the ones you use in an office for internal mail.

What was especially cool was the way Steve Jobs introduced this idea at Mac World (watch his whole show here). A nice bit of drama as he showed the envelope, then revealed the product. The same envelope idea was then used in the simple but highly effective TV advertising.

I shall report back when I have one in my hands….!