Thinnest Laptop Ever – The MacBook Air?! January 17
Turns out that the MacBook Air, while a very nice and thin laptop, is not the thinnest ever. We’re no strangers to throwing a bone to Apple, but this story was amusing to us.
Before founding Amahi, I worked at Transmeta what seem like eons ago. Although I started in the Advanced Development group working on a range of things like virtualization, x86-64 and other things, the majority of my time there was spent developing and productizing a chip codenamed Astro, later called Efficeon (pictured to the right).
Nowadays, only every once in a while the once great company Transmeta resurfaces in the news.
Most of the time, sadly, it’s due to people asking whatever happened with Transmeta (even in for-pay articles), or complaining.
Now, everybody is doing what Transmeta did in it’s time, but in hardware. I sense someone will continue to do it for many years to come.
However, this time, it resurfaced thanks to Apple marketing the MacBook Air as the world’s thinnest notebook.
As it turns out, the thinnest laptop ever is believed to be Sharp’s Muramasa MM10. And I was involved in producing it!
The laptop, which was a thing of beauty and can can still be found on ebay, has an Efficeon chip in it (picture above), which I was heavily involved with (my job was to make it as energy efficient as possible).
The MM10 was 0.54 inch thick (substantially less than the MacBook Air), and shipped in the US in 2003. It came with a 1GHz Efficeon processor from Transmeta (not a Crusoe, mind you, as the Cnet article claims), an ATI Radeon graphics chip, a default of 256MB of memory, a 15GB hard drive and a built-in Wi-Fi module. It ran 2.5 hours on a regular battery, and cost $1,499. Sharp also had a Mebius notebook in the Muramasa family that measured 0.65 inch thick.
This laptop was truly beautiful and stunning. Not only the screen was beautiful, as Sharp is a top manufacturer of LCD screens, the whole laptop was elegant and stylish. The original web page is still around. Check out the pictures. It had a feature where you coul rest it on it’s side on an included cradle and it would make the disk available to your desktop machine. Truly useful, though it never caught on.
So, while the MacBook Air may be the thinnest laptop shipping, and a very very nice laptop, it’s not the thinnest ever. Take that Apple! 😉