Macbook Air… leaves me wanting more.

When Steve Jobs took the stage today in his ubiquitous black shirt, blue jeans and glasses everyone was wondering what was going to happen with the much rumored sub-notebook. We now know this to be the Macbook Air.

The MBA is basically a super-thin Macbook, minus some ports, plus the option of a Solid State Drive.

Don’t get me wrong, people were clamoring for a SSD in a laptop. It’s a really cool technology that offers some great stability, great speed, and great battery performance. There’s a downside however being that they are still stupidly expensive. We are used to $100 500GB drives. 64GB drives are well over $1000USD still.

So what do I see is wrong with the Macbook Air? Two things. First, it’s not small enough. Yes it’s stupidly thin which is cool. But we already have a 13.3″ widescreen Mac. I still kinda miss my 12″ iBook. I wish they had put out a 10″ sub-notebook. That would have been truly useful and fit a niche well. Instead we basically have a thin Macbook with fewer ports.

Then comes the price of the “better” one, which is simply absurd. It pushes over $3000 with the SSD. It still only has 2GB memory (I’ve been using 2GB standard for years now). Basically, it costs about the same as the 17″ Macbook Pro, when both configured to have the fastest available processors (and the $100 high-rez 17″ screen update) and Applecare for both. It’s nuts. Also, while most won’t be watching much video on this I suppose, it doesn’t even include the Apple Remote. It’s an extra $20. On a plus side, it does include a better touchpad that can be used for gestures as you can on the iPhone. Not quite the same, but close.

This computer is really close to perfect, but it’s flawed. It should have been:

• 10″ or so for a screen.
• Ram expandable to 4GB
• Perhaps with a small breakout cable for a “dock” that might include another USB port and Firewire.

But as is it’s overly expensive (and I never say that about an Apple product), and simply doesn’t fit most users. I’m sure some people will love it but I just don’t get it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 12:38 am and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.