MacBook Air Not Really the World’s Thinnest

It looks as if Sharp actually snagged the title in 2003 with the Actius MM10, but didn't have a guy in a turtleneck to promote it.

After all the buzz surrounding Tuesday’s MacBook Air announcement and the fanboy drooling that came in its wake, someone has already gone and cut down Apple’s claim that the Air is the “world’s thinnest notebook.” Cnet’s Michael Kanellos dug up evidence of it on Tuesday, and then again by a bigger margin on Wednesday with the help of an outside party.

While no one argues that the Air is the thinnest notebook on the market today, Kanellos took on a  historical perspective and found some even thinner notebooks from years past.  On Tuesday, Kanellos was ready to hand the crown to the Mitsubishi Pedion, which is 0.7244 inches thick at its thickest point, to the Air’s 0.76 inches.

Despite the tiny margin and the Pedion’s exorbitant $6,000 price tag, it looked as if it had captured the win until Wednesday, when a physics professor at Louisiana State University pointed out that one of the laptops from Sharp’s Muramasa line was significantly thinner. The Actius MM10 Muramasa came out in 2003 and measured just 0.54 inches thick, about a third thinner than either the Pedion or the Air. It also cost just $1,499 and had stats that would have been acceptable at the time, like a 1Ghz processor, 256MB of RAM , a 15GB hard drive and built-in Wi-Fi. Oddly enough, it was actually Kanellos who covered the Actius MM10 for Cnet back in 2003, though he can certainly be forgiven for forgetting the exact dimensions nearly five years later. 

And what does the true world’s thinnest notebook go for these days? About $230 with a broken LCD.