MacBook Air - Page 7

I'm a little late to the party, but I'm having trouble finding out the use time for the Air with the mechanical HD vs. the SSD one. Does anyone know the figure?

My personal opinion about the 'Air' is "meh" though. From reading through the replies on various forums it's pretty obvious that most people didn't realize that this form factor existed before the Air, and it was always very niche because of the huge price premium.

I see no real difference here. You have an enormous price premium over the Pro for the same footprint. It'll appeal to the same niche.

If we could get an ultra-portable with great hardware and a decent sized keyboard but with a UMP footprint out of apple I'd be really stoked.

The laptop I really want to see though is something around the Eee PC pricepoint ($500) with the same footprint, an 800x600 screen, and 6 hours of battery life. I don't think this is too much to ask. Take the 2G Eee PC Surf, add an 800x600 screen, add a dell-like battery pack that sticks out the back, and add $200 to the price.

I hope the Eee 2nd Gen is exactly this.

I don't understand the obsessive bitching that the Air has only 1 USB port.

About the only thing I ever connect to my laptop on the road is a portable hard drive/jump drive or my digital camera, and I can't think of a time when I absolutely had to connect both of them at the same time.

I don't understand the obsession over the optical drive. I rip CDs and DVDs at home, not on the road.

I don't understand the obsession over the lack of ethernet. Outside of the house, I never connect unless it's wireless. I practically live in hotels, and never have stayed in one without wireless.

No one is claiming the Air is a desktop replacement. So why is everyone so pissed that it can't replace his desktop?

--Chris

Typical nerd "It's not exactly what I want" bs. Whatever. Not for you, move along. I think it's cool, but it's not for me either. it's for people that want thin laptops. The people not currently served by apple offerings.

While it is a little silly for people to complain that something isn't exactly what they want -- those features are certainly not typical nerdrage. Toshiba and Sony have shown us that you absolutely do not need to compromise an optical drive or ports in this form factor. These are also pretty standard items on laptops, not just options. Justification really does need to be given for the lack of them, especially as a luxury item.

What's wrong with "typical nerds" saying it doesn't make any sense?


The market is very niche for this product, and I would expect plenty of people to chime in saying so. Especially considering the extreme lack of features when compared to other ultra portable laptops.

I for one hate trackpads, and I don't care how many fingers you can use. I have a nano permanently plugged into my eeepc, and it's awesome. That means I can plug in my camera, or flash drive, or printer, or portable scanner, or keyboard light, or dap, or fullsize rollout keyboard if I ever felt the need. I think the main issue is that it seems like a silly limitation. Did they do this to emphasize the "air" moniker? It seems like it. If other ultraportables can have more usb ports, why not this one? I didn't design the thing, but I think people are just wondering why the decision was made.


You might not, some people like watching DVDs on the plane, or buying CDs on the road, or burning off some pictures onto a DVD while at the parents place so they can have the family photos, or a business presentation that the person who just saw it really wants. Again, not a problem for me as I own a driveless laptop, but I think that sums up the complaints.


Well, I have. I've also been to workplaces without wireless, or to which I wasn't allowed authorization. I've had issues with wifi security and noise at some friends houses. Again, I can understand that it doesn't bother you, but I personally have used the ethernet in my eeepc 4-5 times since I got the machine a month ago, and if I want to transfer large files it's nice to have. (Since my card reader broke) Is it a deal-breaker? Not really, but another annoyance.


Because the base model costs $1800, and other slim laptops do the whole "desktop replacement" thing better I suppose. Honestly I can't see having a laptop as a desktop anyways, but as a gamer/sound guy I'm obviously not that market. You might not understand the objections, but I hope I helped explain a bit.

Pretty much this. If apple announced it was a replacement for the Pro people would go nuts. It's not a replacement for the Pro. No one is saying it is.

As it is, it's really more a fashion statement then anything else. It's just people expect more from Apple.

If we see a gen 2 air though with more ports and a optical drive, then things would be a lot more interesting. I just hope it gets to gen 2, this seems like it might end up like the Cube, an interesting statement but for practical reasons a huge flop.

People were shocked when apple started leaving out floppy drives too. The ability to use drives on other systems + bluetooth makes optical drives and usb ports no where near as necessary as in the past. I appreciate the effort to strip weight. And damn, .2"

For a relatively small size reduction, you sacrifice quite a bit. In the way of connections, I can't recall, did it even have ethernet or the usual firewire? The optical drive I can see doing away with. I was more impressed with the Time Capsule, equal of a wireless NAS? That seems like a reasonable price. I don't think the people at keynote didn't applaud that as much as they should have.

Great point. Ironically, many people were also shocked and appalled when apple started using USB to begin with. Many predicted it would be the end of the end for Apple, and would doom iMac sales.

I agree. I love the Air more and more every minute, but I realize it's expensive and not what everyone had in mind. But I think the real great VALUE product is the Time Capsule, and I wish people would spend more time talking about that.

--Chris

for those of you complaining about hating trackpads and wanting to plug in your mouse...there's this thing called a bluetooth mouse...and it like, wirelessly connects your like mouse to your like laptop. it's like really neat and like really useful on the road so like you don't have to like take up a usb port so like you can connect like other things to it.

Here's the thing:

You want a cheap laptop: Apple MacBook
You want a thin laptop: MacBook Air
You want a desktop replacement: Macbook Pro
You want a remote video editing monster: MacBook Pro 17"
You want a laptop with no moving parts: MacBook Air w/ SSD Drive

Each laptop in the lineup is targetted at different people. The MacBook Air isn't aimed at most people.

that's right, grawk. apparently others think that if it's not useful for them it's not useful at all. go figure.

I've heard this so many times, and it's complete revisionist history. A lot of the success of Firewire can be laid at the feet of apple, but USB was well on its way to full adoption at the time Apple embraced it.

I would argue that optical drives are actually becoming more important, not less. When the average disc size was approaching 60 gigs, a 1.44Mb floppy drive was completely inadequate. That's 0.0024% of the capacity of the drive. The solution to the problem eventually because Optical drives for large files (which was adopted quickly) and thumb drives for small files (after a brief flirt with super-floppies like Zip). Apple openly embraced all three while at the same time obsoleting the floppy.

Right now the hard drive on the MacBook Air is 64 Gb on the solid state drive. Your average single layer DVD represents 7.1% of the storage space available, which is orders of magnitudes larger then what floppies represented. This is also completely ignoring the use as a DVD player. Optical drives right now are by no means obsolete and writing them off like people did floppies a decade ago is intellectually dishonest.