Welcome to the next generation of iPho…er, pod…er, laptop. Steve Jobs presents…the MacBook Air. Steve has had the vision to retool a small subset of the PC market and remake it the Apple way.
The Good:
It weighs three pounds. It has a decently fast 1.6 or 1.8GHz processor from Intel. It has a decent battery life. The option of an SSD hard drive isn’t horribly over-priced (online, I found a 64GB SSD drive for around $1300 just by using a Google search).
The Bad:
It has no internal optical drive. It costs significantly more than a MacBook.
The What Doesn’t Really Matter:
The fixed RAM is a non-issue really. For what this unit is intended for, you’ll never need more than 2 Gigs. The non-customer installable battery is also a non-issue. If you buy an Apple replacement battery for the unit, the battery installation is free.
What It All Really Means:
The MacBook Air isn’t your average laptop, nor was it ever intended to be. This is what your iPod would be if it took as many steroids as several baseball players. It’s an ultra-portable device that gives you access to your files everywhere and anywhere you want them. It even does it without breaking your back. Cell phone providers like Sprint and Verizon both offer cell cards for laptops as well as support for the Mac. Sprint offers a USB card over its CDMA (Rev. A) network, which is arguably more prevalent than Cingular’s HSDPA and faster than GPRS 3G. It’s the way of the future. Your documents, movies, and music are readily accessible anywhere. All your files are stored in one central location. No more carrying around a large book of DVDs on the flight to the Caribbean, so you have room to rub elbows with the rich and famous at the Atlantis resort. Or edit that Word document while sipping Merlot as you sit at the foot of a water fountain in some little village in the south of France. Heck, I’m pretty sure that you can even sit in your ma’s basement playing World of Warcraft on it. |
