MacBook Air conisderations
There’s a lot of talk around the Internet, from blogs to “mainstream media”, about the failings of the MacBook Air. Those center around a few things that I’d like to speculate randomly about, having no knowledge of the thought process behind them, but generally able to think about why people might make certain choices:
No replaceable batter. This observation is slightly misleading. The battery is replaceable, but not with a quick flick of the wrist. This is, as with the iPod, an amazingly vociferous complaint by many people, yet I wonder. I spend nearly every week on the road, and generally would be classified as a “road warrior”. I put in almost 100 flights last year, and in all that time, with all the delays and time in airports, I didn’t see a single person swap their battery on their notebook. That includes me.
I saw a lot of people struggling to find an AC outlet, but nobody swapping batteries on their laptop, or their cell phone. It seems to me that this is a speculative requirement that isn’t based on anything exists in any sizable fraction of the marketplace. Are there people who do it? Sure. There are people who do anything you can imagine—just wander the Internet sometime. That doesn’t mean it’s worth the tradeoff in thinness and potentially absolute storage.
Now, when it comes time to replace the battery because it’s no longer holding a charge, that’s a more realistic concern. As with the iPod, Apple offers a battery replacement service, but various articles around the Internet show how trivially easy it is to pop the case open to replace it. This is something that makes it easier for 3rd parties to provide competitive replacements. Who knows, like the iPod, they might even offer higher-capacity batteries in the same space.
No CD/DVD drive. Ooga booga. I’ve been carrying an IBM ThinkPad as my primary work notebook for 2 years now. It doesn’t have a CD/DVD in it. I have one at home that I can slide in, but I chose to replace that with additional storage (lots of VMWare images). About once every month or so, I need to pull something off a CD that a vendor gave me. That means either I need to have someone else do it, and stick it on a USB token/file server/etc., or I simply tell vendors to stop giving me useless discs. Seriously, this is a non-issue, just as the obsession over floppy drives in the original iMac was a bigger issue in the pundit’s mind than any normal human being.
Lack of Broadband Wireless. This is potentially an issue, but I look at it from two perspectives. First, whoever Apple used to integrate WWAN access, the pundits would have complained that their pet company wasn’t included. Second, with the obviously impending release of a 3G iPhone, the ability to tether the two together seems not only obviously, but stupidly obvious to me. Apple doesn’t support that Bluetooth profile right now in the iPhone, but then again, the EDGE network isn’t that fast. Trust me when I say you don’t want to try and run an IPsec VPN over EDGE. UMTS? Sure. It’s coming. Apple doesn’t let you sync over Bluetooth either, but can you imagine how the pundits would howl at how slow it was to sync a movie to their iPhone over Bluetooth? It’s for tiny stuff, audio, and a few things. It’s not for moving gigabytes of data you doofuses.
Firewire. Firewire as a storage solution is dead. It’s unfortunate, but there it is. USB sucks. USB2.0 is painfully slow compared to 8 year old Firewire because it’s a dumb protocol. VHS sucks compared to Beta. Firewire is alive in the video editing space, but as a good friend of mine is a director, I think I can say that he’d never, ever consider using a MacBook Air for serious work. It’s not a performance issue, it’s the fact that you need a big screen and big storage to work with HD video. The MacBook doesn’t cut it either, and it has Firewire.
Other pet feature I’ve forgotten. I’m sure there’s a billion other complaints, but the thing is this: It’s not for everyone. Not everyone wants to use a Sony TZ either. I had a coworker with one, and while he loved the size, he constantly complained about the tiny keyboard and microscopic screen. I contemplated one, but the keyboard was a non-starter. Sure it’s cute and has a lot of features, but it doesn’t have the productivity I need.
If you don’t like it, don’t buy it. The iPod Nano isn’t for everyone either, and that’s why Apple has created a range of products. Imagine, a notebook with a big screen, and lots of ports, and Firewire, and an ExpressCard slot to put your favorite wireless card in… imagine! Imagine what you could do with such a miraculous machine!
Oh wait, it’s called the MacBook Pro.
This entry was posted at 8:08 pm on 28 January 2008 and is filed under Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
I think the Macbook Air is an attractive option, but I’ll probably wait until rev 2 or until I can get a hard disk bigger than 100GB. The only thing is the missing DVD burner, because I like to burn slideshows on my Powerbook. However, it’s no major thing to buy the $100 USB Superdrive, or purchase a burner for one of the machines on my home network which would probably cost even less.
Apple has made a killing in the last couple of years making products that don’t try to be everything to everyone. Hopefully their is a MacBook Air in my future. It will be a nice replacement for the 12 inch Powerbook G4 I use at home now.
I think Randy hits on the exact thing. Trying to be everything to everyone is a losing proposition. BMW doesn’t try to be everything to everyone, nor does Ferrari, Lotus or even Mercedes.
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I think the AirMac is really cool. The same way I like Dodge Vipers and Porsche 928’s. Amazing. Fun to look at and drool about it. But I’ll never own one. Even if I could afford it. It’s just not the car for me. It doesn’t fit my real lifestyle (though my imaginary lifestyle drives one all the time). It’s bragging rights for the vendor to hold it up as a flagship.