Macbook Air – My thoughts

On Tuesday, Steve Jobs walked on stage and among other things announced a laptop that many saw coming: the Macbook Air (MBA). Weighing just three pounds and measuring a whopping .16 to .76 inches, this machine is definitely the most portable I’ve seen. However, with small size comes great compromise and I feel there are some things that apple left out that you would expect to have in an expensive laptop. With a cost of $1799 USD, here are my thoughts on the Macbook air:

• One USB Port

  With external hard drives, keyboards and mice, and tons of other peripherals on the market and in the consumers possession, one USB is nothing. Either you will be swapping out cables to use each device when you need it or you will have to shell out some more cash to buy an additional USB hub. I fell that when you buy a new machine you should be able to use it for whatever you want, within reason, without buying any addons. This is even funnier when you consider how hard apple is pushing it’s consumers to use an external HD to back up their data yet they only give one USB port to connect a HD to your machine, what a joke.

• Underpowered

  The macbook air is an extremely underpowered machine using components apple would never use. First of all, the MBA is using a 80GB 4200-rpm hard drive which is the same drive they use in their ipod classic line. Secondly, the MBA’s cpu runs at an amazingly slow 1.6GHz; remember, the mac mini is using basically the same chip but the base model is running at 1.83GHz. With this is mind why would you buy a Macbook Air? For $200 more you can purchase a Macbook Pro with a 120gb hard SATA drive running at 5400 rpm, a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, and a dedicated NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics with 128MB SDRAM graphics card. Basically, you get a bigger screen, a faster CPU, a larger and faster HD, a dedicated graphics card and an overall faster machine. So, why wouldn’t you? Plus, you could save money and go the Macbook route and still get a faster machine.

• Remote Disc

  From the apple website, remote disc is defined as
  

  An innovative feature that allows you to access the DVD or CD drive of a nearby Mac or Windows PC. It’s perfect for installing software and retrieving files.

  This feature was implemented because the Macbook Air doesn’t have a built in Optical drive. (Apple offers an external drive for an expensive $99) The lack of an optical drive is one huge complaint but what makes it worse is apple’s reasoning, “Consumers don’t want and optical drive and we expect that most users don’t purchase the external super drive” -Steve Jobs (from his keynote). So what apple did was write some code called remote disc which, like you learned above, allows the user to use the drive on another machine. However, that machine needs to be networked with your MBA and also needs to have special software installed on it. If this machine was made for the rode warrior, how can you expect them to carry around a disc that they would have to install on another computer, if they can even find one, just to use it’s optical drive?

With all the faults that this machine has there are also some good things about it. For example, multitouch gestures allow you to use those features found on iPhones including pinching, swiping or rotating by simply moving your fingers on your trackpad. The addition of a ‘backlit’ keyboard is perfect for typing at night or in low light situations when you don’t want to turn on the lights. Plus, the form factor and design of this machine is unmatched by anything else on the market today. Look for other companies to follow in these footsteps.

Overall, this machine has it’s forthcoming’s and is something I would never pick up. But for some people the amazing design is all they care about. For some, it’s not whats under the hood but it’s how the machine looks. If your one of these people, or an actual road warrior, and you don’t needed to install software via a disc besides maybe the first day, then this machine is for you. If you want more power at an additional, and low, cost I would check out the Macbook Pro. Or you can check out the macbook which costs less than both machines and is more powerful than the MBA in it’s own right.