The MacBook Air weighs a little over three pounds. Airy, but there’s lighter. Not surprisingly, Apple wants to weigh that little—under three pounds. The easiest way to cut the fat is to use a material less heavy than aluminum that won’t compromise the body’s integrity. Enter carbon fiber, which AppleInsider says might replace the Air’s lower aluminum case. AppleInsider says a pre-production MacBook Air running around looked exactly the same as the current model, but with a black carbon fiber bottom. According to the teardown geeks at iFixit, the heaviest structural component besides the unibody chassis—which supposedly will continue to be machined from a single block of aluminum—is the bottom cover. Replacing it with carbon fiber would bring the Air’s weight down by 100 grams to 2.78 pounds, lighter than the Samsung X360, and that’s without shaving slivers of weight off elsewhere in the Air’s design. AppleInsider reiterates that they’re publishing the info on the carbon fiber redesign “strictly as a rumor,” but adds that it’s far enough along in the dev cycle to show up in a MacBook Air revision next year. It sounds plenty plausible to us, though maybe not with that mismatched black bottom. [AppleInsider]
