Ars posted their review of the MacBook Air. “Sure, there are other subnotebooks on the Windows side of the aisle that offer a variety of different configurations. There are ones with smaller screens that people love because they are even more portable. There are ones with built-in optical drives. There are ones with more ports. There are ones with more power. And there’s nothing wrong with that, if that’s what you want. But the MacBook Air is the only super-thin notebook that (legally) runs Mac OS X, and we feel that Apple did a decent job at figuring out how its users would use such a computer. It’s not perfect by any means, and we hope to see Apple make improvements upon the Air with future iterations.” AppleInsider has another review.
I still don’t get it. I just don’t see how loosing half an inch in girth is going to dramatically make anyones life easier. Screen width and weight I can understand, but not girth.
Given the choice, I know I’d much rather have the marginally bigger yet significantly more powerful as well as cheaper laptop (in fact that is what I did). I don’t care about the girth so long as the screen width fits in my record bag.
Each to their own though and good luck to those who do choose to buy one of these (as I’m sure there’ll be no shortage of customers).
Edited 2008-02-04 23:30 UTC
I will agree that the “Air” goes a bit too far in what it leaves out. I mean how much extra weight do two more USB ports provide?? USB and ethernet ports are essential.
On the other hand though, I understand its place in the market. I recently bought a lightweight Toshiba Satellite and it’s great. Perfect for web surfing or email while your outside or whatever.
What I don’t understand are the “desktop replacements”. They are way too heavy to be really portable, too expensive, not upgradeable, and have no battery life.
Why do people buy them?
As I posted in an earlier article, I agree with Laurence. Apple seem to have inexplicably focused on the attribute which has the most *immediate* impact but the *least* long-term importance.
I agree with you (and I’m sure Laurence would too) that *weight* is important, but weight isn’t what Apple talk about for the Air. It’s always the thickness. That’s what they always talk about, that’s what the ads are about. It’s not the lightest notebook around – Sony still owns that title, I believe.
Mainly the people who buy desktop replacements use them to carry from one location to another in a car. e.g. from work to home, or from one particular office to another. They don’t use them in coffee shops (while wearing polo necks and talking about Web 2.0) or on the beach or other hipster locations, but for a specific need – a cheap and powerful machine with all desktop features that you can move from one place to another without *too* much effort – they make a lot of sense.
Yeah, I don’t really buy that argument. I mean unless you are are writting 3D games and actually need to have that much grunt in a “portable” device, it’s pointless.
It’s extremely rare to get a real business case for them. I use my work machine from home, and vice versa, and I port my data on my external HDD.
Having worked in PC Support for a few years, it’s been my experience that the only people that actually use desktop replacements are managers … for email, Word and porn.
Well, I use my laptop as my only system, and I need as much horsepower as I can as I build stuff quite a lot.
It’s true that probably the vast majority of computer users these days never use the full power of their CPU, but that applies to ultraportables and desktops as much as ‘big’ laptops. It’s a general point. Actually, the difference between ultras and bigger laptops is usually in areas like connectivity, hard drive size / speed, battery life, screen quality and keyboard quality, not raw CPU power.
There are a whole bunch of other areas than writing 3D games that require horse power. All kinds of scientific, engineering and design visualisation for a start. There is also number crunching and data analysis work which requires a lot of horsepower, while not necessarily so much 3d power.
Another reason for a portable workstation is one of software licenses. Your company might not want to spend the necessary cash needed for you to have all your work tools on your home PC, but you might want to work from home. If you have the tools on your laptop you just solved that problem.
But sure I agree with you that most people who don’t need a super powerful laptop. Then again I’d say that most people don’t need as powerful compters as then ones they have, no matter what the category.
(Emphasis: mine)
Even if it’s a completely unintentional side-effect, making a laptop more thin is also going to make it lighter (assuming the other dimensions stay the same, of course).
I think it depends on how and what the laptop is being used for. Mine is carried in a backpack quite often and I noticed a difference just going from a laptop weighing 4lbs to one weighing 3.5, at least when I’m carrying it for two or three hours a day.
With that sort of usage, I happily sacrifice speed for the sake of weight.
>MacBook Air is the only super-thin notebook that
>(legally) runs Mac OS X
They forgot to mention that this comment only applies to the US. And they also make it sound like running OSX is something which can not. A more proper wording would be “Air is the only notebook you are allowed to run OSX on.” to emphasize that its Apples weird licensing policy that makes this noteworthy.
Apart from that, isnt it, well, kinda weak to have the major feature of a product (running os x) be a solution to a problem you caused yourself (licensing restrictions)?
I was disappointed when I first saw the Macbook Air. I was hoping that they would come out with an ultra-portable. I think that the old Powerbook 12 inch is a better form factor for traveling.
The air seems suited traveling from the boardroom to the desk. It also might be a good couch-computer, and perhaps for taking notes in class.
The Air has little place in a traveling work environment, short battery non-swappable life. Ports help make a computer useful for such things as backing up pictures from cameras, and backing up the computer itself.
I wonder why they didn’t reduce the bezel size, equal to that of the Macbook Pro.
I would guess that Apple’s Spotlight will greatly increase wear on the solid state drives. Perhaps it can be disabled.
I’d bet they are going to sell a lot more EEE PC’s this year than Macbook Airs. It’s an unfair comparison, because of screensize, but the Air is about a pound heavier than a EEE PC.
Would Spotlight be really this bad on SSD? What wears them the most are write operations and Spotlight is more about indexing data. I doubt it performs write operations that often.
I doubt it holds its hashes/indexes in memory.
Theres a tool to snoop, actually using the same API that Spotlight uses.
http://www.kernelthread.com/software/fslogger/
Once the index is created, sure. But during indexing, for every (indexable) thing it reads, it writes something to its index database (disclaimer: I have no idea how Spotlight stores its index).
The closest thing I am more familiar with is Gnome Tracker. While indexing, watch your ~/.cache/tracker directory, and all the files in it changing. Now, it isn’t as bad as it could be as a lot of the writes are cached and then done all at once, and I suspect Spotlight would be similar.
Not to mention one isn’t indexing everything all the time. So I guess Spotlight wouldn’t be too bad on a SSD, but it would create at least some extra writes.
Writes to solid state drives aren’t much of a concern these days. A given sector on a quality flash chip can handle 100,000 writes. And, wear-leveling spreads the “damage” around, so it’s going to take a while for that particular sector to read its maximum writes.
Unless Spotlight is writing multiple megabytes per second continuously, it’s not much of a concern. Modern SSDs will likely outlast traditional hard drives.
Someone in the EeePC community did a great breakdown of SSD lifespan: http://wiki.eeeuser.com/ssd_write_limit?s=ssd%20writes
I read many reviews about Air and they end up the same way: lots of trade-offs to have a fancy machine.
To me, this product has been rushed to the market while it was still not ready. Not because of Apple but maybe because technology doesn’t allow such machines yet. Anyway, this cannot be your primary machine, cannot be a good business machine (you don’t want to ask your collegues or your customer to host your DVDs anytime in order for you to read them, don’t you? The same way you don’t want to go to your customer for your fancy business meeting only to discover they don’t have any Wi-Fi network and you don’t have an Ethernet port, don’t you? And this list could go on…), it’s not even a good personal machine.
And my biggest disappointment is battery life! I could understand a $3,000 machine having all I need and being so thin. That would be an hi-end machine: maybe I would buy it, maybe I wouldn’t. But this way, you have half what you need and you will go on adding “something” to your Air in order to do stuff.
I wonder why Apple is rushing to the market all of its products lately. iPhone was rushed, Leopard was rushed (according to what I read) and now Air. Given recent music companies’ problems, maybe Jobs is smelling them entering digital music market and iTunes having some troubles in a near future…
The article seems to point out a serious performance issue in the OS.
A dual core CPU running with 2 GB of ram and a fairly standard 4200rpm HD cannot smoothly stream a video and run a chat client?
I could do that on my old P2-300, 96 MB of ram thinkpad from 1998. I am not really suprised as most Apple products are form over function, but that is laughable scheduling!
Apples Motto:
“Make it cool looking and make it expensive and THEY WILL COME”
Macbook Air – A two thousand dollar fashion accessory!