After mixed success with its first line of MacBook Air notebooks, Apple hit its stride late last year with a faster, longer-lasting, refreshed Air (review). Today the company announced that the line was undergoing another transformation with a 2011 line of MacBook Airs, which come with the latest version of OSX, called Lion.
Like last year's MacBook Air, the new models come in 11 and 13 inch flavors, but the guts have been completely reworked. The new Airs are packing Core i5 and i7 processors, which Apple is saying will offer 2.5 times more processing power compared to the 2010 model. They've also added a backlit keyboard, which is good news if you're planning on doing some nighttime typing on a red eye.
The other improvement over last year's model is the addition of Thunderbolt, the new data transfer port we took a look at on this year's iMac a few months ago. We had some issues testing the port, as there weren't very many devices which supported it at the time, but now just about every major Apple computer comes with one, which should make transferring files and streaming data a lot faster for Mac fans.
Perhaps most interesting about the new line of MacBook Air is that it's the end of an era for baseline MacBooks. The white, plastic MacBook line is being replaced by these new MacBook Airs. No need to fret about a price jump, though. The Air's starting price is the same as the old MacBooks, at $999.
I'll be going hands-on with the new MacBook Air in the next few days, so stay tuned for some more detailed impressions.