Why the MacBook Air won’t Take Flight. Yet.
Steve Jobs drew this year’s MacWorld keynote address to a close by pulling Apple’s latest portable offering out of a standard letter envelope: the MacBook Air. But whispers around the Mac community seem to cast doubt on whether the ultra-portable will be ably to fly at all.
Mac pundits had predicted an ultra-portable would be introduced to fill the gap between the highly popular consumer-level MacBook and the pro-level MacBook Pro. Mac fans had expected, in a pre-keynote atmosphere of hope and excitement, that Apple’s foray into the ultra-portable market would, as is usually the case, be revolutionary.
But seeing what’s come out of the envelope, it seems it’ll be some time before any revolution.
Apple says that the MacBook Air is “the world’s thinnest notebook”, and this, above all, seems to have been the design vision. Measuring 0.76″ in thickness to as low as 0.16″ at the thinnest edges, the Air is an amazing feat of engineering — Intel had to scale down the Core 2 Duo processor to make it fit the thing — and art. It’s fantastically sleek, and brings much innovation in its multi-touch trackpad (and gestures), smart use of 802.11n connectivity and sheer beauty. But that’s where the glitz ends, as the notebook struggles to find a niche market to save it from the fate of the PowerMac G4 Cube, which, also an impressive attempt at miniaturization, failed to appeal to the market it was after.
The MacBook Air is aimed at those who want portability above all – outdoor-adventure types, cyclists, trekkers, travelers. The sort of people who’ll make field documentaries and films, conduct research and write media reports from remote places, where the computer should be the last of their worries. Deliver media from anywhere they go, because as Apple sees it, now that they’ve got the Air, they can take their computer with them.
But technical restrictions make the Air a beautiful but less-than-competent computer for the job. It doesn’t have a FireWire port essential to capturing video from digital tapes, no audio in for recording, doesn’t have a phone modem port to connect from areas where WiFi/WiMax networks don’t exist, comes default with a standard notebook 80GB hard-disk drive with moving parts, omits the optical drive, and — for the first time in the history of Apple portables — has protruding flaps for what little I/O ports it does have.
To be fair, Apple does provide solutions: there’s a single USB 2.0 port for data transfer, an option for a 64GB solid-state hard-disk with no moving parts; even Apple’s omission of the optical drive in favor of saving space is not an absolutely terribly compromise considering that they do indeed provide a portable USB 2.0-compatible external drive to compensate for it, and also a way for the Air to wirelessly “borrow” another computer’s drive.
But it all becomes a little senseless when you put the focus back on portability. Something has to be wrong when an ultra-portable device — even this term makes less sense considering that the cheaper MacBook is virtually the same size in width and breadth as the Air, even slightly smaller, except in thickness — requires additional accessories to be any useful in the very areas it’s meant to serve. So lug around the external optical drive, an external modem, an external audio interface maybe and worry about the flap breaking. And, of course, pay extra.
Some Mac users are asking who exactly Apple is targeting with this device, and it seems increasingly clear that — at a price point of around US $1800, $700 over base MacBook and $300 below the base MacBook Pro — only those who value owning the “thinnest laptop” ever, above everything else, will end up buying one. The technical capabilities are nothing to write home about, and although this notebook a perfect city computer for those who just want a computer for Web, email and documents, the price is prohibitive for that group as well.
With the MacBook and the MacBook Pro already so popular with students, professionals and everyone-else in between — including musicians, video professionals, digital media artists — would it sell enough to keep it afloat? With a huge profit margin, maybe. But with the rise of social networking sites and democratization of digital media, everybody seems to want to dabble with home music recording (sites like iCompositions and MacJams cater to just them), photos and video (YouTube is exploding); how accommodating is MacBook Air to the demands of those it targets?
Beyond the initial sales in the heat and excitement of a new Apple product, and support from loyal Apple fans and technology enthusiasts, it would seem that Apple needs to find new ways to make the MacBook Air more useful in an early revision if it wants to save the universe’s thinnest laptop from starving to death.
Article by Parimal Satyal. Photos by MacSwitching.com
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January 23rd, 2008Buying any Apple laptop requires making choices. For most people, MacBook or MacBook Pro is best. But for plenty who travel (or even move around for meetings within the workplace), MacBook Air is more than adequate.
A device either goes in my pocket or in my standard-sized briefcase/backpack. There is really nothing in between. For pocket or briefcase/ backpack, how light it is and how thin it is are the biggest drivers. Go pack your briefcase/backpack and see where you’d put your computer and what makes the biggest difference.
I have a ThinkPad X60 for work: it’s optical drive is in the cradle – the cradle sits in a drawer at home; it has an Ethernet port but I use wifi at work, home, hotels, airports, etc; it only has a 12″ screen – I’d really like a bigger one; and I’ve never swapped batteries even on long flights. With an MBA, the only adapter I’d carry around is the one for VGA as I’d need it to plug into projectors.
Recognize that there are a couple of hidden agendas here like they did by dropping the floppy drive and parallel/serial ports:
1. Apple is trying to make wifi more ubiquitous, and the lack of an Ethernet port is a push in that direction. But I’d agree Apple needs to do a bit more to make wifi even more ubiquitous.
2. Apple is trying to move people to digital media for content and software, and the lack of an optical drive is a push in that direction. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple starts offering all its software for sale via download.