I'll lay my cards on the table. I don't want a MacBook Air; at least not right now. That's not to say I'm unimpressed with the laptop. It is – from what I can tell from photos over here in wait-a-few-more-weeks-or-months land – spectacularly well engineered. I don't agree at all with the line of thought that says it's a crucially flawed machine. I just don't happen to be on the market for a new notebook yet either.
Five years and five Macworlds ago, when I was still running Windows myself, Jobs presented a pair of PowerBooks to the world; big and small: 12 and 17 inches. I don't know exactly what the reaction was … it took a few months for their existence to come to my attention, as uninterested as I then was. It was actually a TV advert of all things which woke me up to this sweet pair of opposites, memorably wielded in airline seats by the inimitable Verne Troyer and Yao Ming. It's not all that often Apple advertises Macs in a big way in Britain and it just so happened the timing was auspicious. I'd been through a really bad year of horrible hardware and atrocious reliability while in what turned out to be my last ever attack of home-build desktop mania. I remember muttering about the fact this was a Mac of all things which so suddenly had my desire, but it turned out I was at the right point to make the switch anyway. I read up what I could and decided this "OS X" thing I'd never heard of before was probably for the better. It was. The little 12" PowerBook has seen me from Jaguar up to Leopard and still serves as my daily portable.
Five years since I was using Windows? It feels longer ago than that.
Before Macworld, my expectations were brewing like many that Apple might be about to do to the Mac what they have already done with the iPhone. Something in the air? How about the internet: all the time? John Gruber put it well in his (obligatory) Macworld prediction:
After using my iPhone for a few months, it started feeling weird that my PowerBook doesn’t have ubiquitous wireless networking: Wi-Fi when available, and seamless, instant switchover to something else when it isn’t. … Ubiquitous networking is certainly the most intriguing thing about Amazon’s Kindle. It just feels crippled that I can’t get a network connection — even a slow one — once I’m outside the range of Wi-Fi.His predictions were pretty much spot on. The article's quite a testament to what a judicious reading of the rumours can do when coupled with Apple's clever evolutionary knack. They just don't release things as early on in development as others do. I don't doubt they have a tablet project with prototypes wandering around their offices as we speak, nor that the ubiquitous networking side isn't being looked into either. It's just that neither is ready, while the MacBook Air certainly was.
Seeing as I'm so inured to my 867MHz of PowerBook G4, and I've an Intel desktop at home, there's not that much which the MacBook Air can offer me … quite yet. If it had summoned the beginning of truly untethered laptop computing, then sure I couldn't pretend I wouldn't be all over it! But that is the essence of what I'm waiting for. The MacBook Air is a fair bit larger than my 12" PowerBook in area: a fact which although finicky, does count for something when you're trying to fit it in your bag and on your travels. I doubt that a more typical sub-portable would have swung me either though, so long as it was still in the current age of a-few-hour's battery and 802.11 Wi-Fi or *nothing*.
The silence … it hurts! What I'd do for the convenience of even slow roaming access, given Apple's polish.
Many of the more controversial design decisions taken with the MacBook Air are ideas I quite agree with. I'm still on my PowerBook's original battery for the use it's had, and the faster my Wi-Fi the less ports I use as my desktop is given the load of hosting these things for me to access at my convenience. It's a different story if you want to edit video on your portable: for which anything less than a MacBook Pro is surely not even worth considering, right? I dare say that it takes a certain kind of user to manage to live entirely from a laptop without these things, without even their own desktop to back it up … although that cunning little Time Capsule box Apple unveiled on the same day solves one side of that problem, for the casual style of users who just might pull it off. Of course, the clamour online isn't from "typical users" but us techno-geek obsessives, so it's best to not read too much into it.
No: I could certainly live with a MacBook Air as my laptop and Mac of first recall, so long as it's backed up with something with all the oomph and sockets when I need it. If I can, most of the market can too. Ergo I think it will do perfectly well enough for Apple sales-wise too.
What do you reckon: how many laptops will have disc drives and ports all around their edges in a few years time? Any? Not likely … just think of the first iMac and what heralded for then still seemingly inescapable floppies.
I wonder though. Will my next Mac be a tablet? Would I still need a notebook at all? That depends on Apple of course, who may well have very different ideas for tablets than for Macs. We still have to see. Though I needn't point out that whatever course they choose, it'll be the most interesting out there and do just what they've done time and time before to their lacklustre competition.
