Rumor: New 11.6 inch MacBook Air on tap for this fall

Netbooks may not be better for Steve, but they have been for me. The last Apple laptop I had was a 12" PB G4, and I replaced that with several Hackintoshed netbooks. I'm currently on an HP Mini 311, which is 11.6", and for me, it's right at the the sweet spot of size. I would *gladly* pay a premium to get an Al unibody, SSD, and official Apple OSX support. I like the iPad, but I want full OSX, and the 13" MBP & MBA were always a little too big for me. If this happens, it will prove just how mainstream the netbook market has become. In a sense Apple is leaving money on the table by not participating fully.

Remove the screen bezel, and you don't even need to reduce the screen! Make it touch the borders, like the iphone does. That's about 2 inches smaller yet being a 13" one with a full-sized keyboard.

Put just one more usb port, hdmi/displayport output and it's perfect.

I think Apple needs to get off its high horse and just reposition the AIR as its netbook clone. Have it be $349 and watch those puppies sell.

My girlfriend has a netbook and its a pretty good machine. Sometimes people just want to surf the web, and use basic programs and don't need video editing or hardcore gaming. Why does every apple product need to be $500 more than a PC, why can't it ever be comparable? I think its superior products but I don't want PC to be 1 FOREVER. Lower the prices, and apple will gain huge sales to justify the money they lose. I want apple to have 50% of the market share not 8%

Using the 1st gen Air since September 2008. The only problem I got is the heat problem. Whenever the room temperature is too high (~30C). The machine would starts "kernel_task" to slow down the CPU. And this is my only complain on the MB Air.

IMHO, Air is a great for travel ultra-portable secondary machine - since I have myself an iMac and a Dell tower. If you only want a single mac for everyday use, with bigger screen, more USB/Firewire ports, more processing power or storage and able to travel, just choose every other Macbooks in the store except the Macbook Air.

This may well be Apple's response for something to replace the 12.1" Powerbook. Enough people bought those and demanded an Intel-powered replacement.

What the air needs is disk upgrade and processor upgrade. It's a fine machine for business travel.

I have an original Air, and I just can't see getting a new one just so I can continue waiting for the pinwheel to stop spinning every time I try to load TUAW in Safari.

Honestly I want an Air form factor laptop (running OS X) with an i7 and 4GB RAM min, and its getting to the point where I may have to build it myself because it looks like Apple never will.

Here's my silly idea: make two different 11.6" laptops. One with a physical keyboard (MacBook) and another one with a touch-screen keyboard (MacBook Air.) The touch-screen keyboard would be far thinner than any physical keyboard could ever be, and it could also act as an integrated trackpad. The MacBook Air could be made extremely thin with, say, an AMOLED keyboard. Thin enough to make a real statement.

I think that not having a 13'' is a dumb idea. I have a 13'' MBA with a SSD. My wife also has a 15'' 2.8Ghz MBP. We bought both machines in March 2010. My MBA is better than my wife's MBP in the following respects:

1. It starts up a lot quicker
2. It runs office and windows applications a lot faster
3. It is a lot lighter & can be easily carried around all day.

Also although my MBA has only 2 GB of ram it runs windows VMware Fusion at quite respectable speeds.

The only drawback is that it gets a little hot sometimes.

I think that people have not realised how good the MBA is (perhaps apple has not realised this as well).

I'm an engineer and the MBA covers 99% of my needs.

My opinion:
• Yes to an 11.6"
BUT
• Don't kill the 13". The 13" MBA is a great productivity tool!

Unless Apple wants to reposition the MacBook Air in it's line up I bet it will still be a premium priced notebook.

Thinner, lighter, more powerful. Probably come with larger SSD drives by default. Probably no more HDD option. Battery life has to be great. 10+ hours.