Apple's MacBook Air has always prided itself on being one of the slimmest laptop computers on the market. The new 2010 refresh of the MacBook Air made things even slimmer and more compact.
Part of that was thanks to neat tricks with the LCD assembly, by having the LCD makers finish only the cell portion of the LCD module and passing it off to the backlight manufacturer to finish the rest of it. This sort of process shaved off between 3 to 5 millimeters off of the thickness of the LCD.
While Apple was the first to put this into use, the same process is now available to Acer, Asus and Lenovo. Digitimes believes that this will mean that we'll see some thin 13.3- and 14-inch notebooks using Sandy Bridge chips by the end of the first quarter.
So, if you've been lusting after that sleek form factor of the MacBook Air, but you want a PC, there could be the answer in just a few months.