Apple MacBook Air picks up Sandy Bridge, Thunderbolt, and backlit keyboard

Yes, we know that the big excitement of the day is the release of Mac OS X Lion, but if you're more of a hardware person, you should know that Apple has released a refreshed MacBook Air this morning. The 13- and 11-inch notebooks now sport Intel Sandy Bridge Core i5 and i7 processors, backlit keyboards, Thunderbolt ports (replacing the old Mini DisplayPort,) and ship with Mac OS X Lion installed.

Pricing starts at $999 for the 11.6-inch model, which gives you 64 GB SSD, 2 GB RAM, and a Core i5 1.6 GHz processor. For $1199, you get the 11.6-incher with 4 GB RAM and 128 GB SSD. Both models offer five hours of battery life. Moving on to the 13-inch model, that starts at $1,299 and hits you with a 128 GB SSD, 4 GB RAM, and a 1.7 GHz Intel Core i5 processor. Step it up to $1,599, and you get a 256 GB SSD instead, and the 13-inchers give you 7 hours of battery life. Everything else remains the same (which means the FaceTime cameras haven't been upgraded to HD) here, and they're available now on the Apple Store.