Staff Thoughts On The MacBook Air

The following is a continuation of Thursday’s (01/17/08) MyMac Staff thread on the MacBook Air.

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I am jumping in late here, but I was very disappointed with the Air. The cost, the non-user replaceable battery, small amount of ram, too small hard disk, and the lousy Intel graphics chip. All at the price of a Pro unit. And after playing with it, I do not want it.

But what bothers me most is that there is a new trend with Apple and other companies where form OVER function is the rule of the day. When did that happen? At the cost of many things, Apple decided that 1/2” of extra height (I talked to the project manager) was too much to put in to give all those extras. And when I questioned him on the issues, he said, and I quote, “..well, on long flights, I guess you will just have to sit in Business or First Class to get the power connection…”

Just how out of touch are these people? I would hope they would have learned SOMETHING from the iPod and iPhone! I guess not.

And for the record, when playing with the 1.8 Ghz model, it was VERY slow in response to the multi-touch panel. I was not impressed.

As for the cost:

$1799.
$300 speed bump to 1.8 GHz, which you will want.
$200 for the external optical disk
$30 for an Ethernet adapter
$245 for the extended warranty, which you WILL want.
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$2574 <-- This is not cheap. Like the iPhone, I think I will wait for the 3rd version! ======= The price of that custom low profile case is that it is sealed, like an iPod, from what I could see. No user access at all. Just be aware - it is gorgeous and somewhat wallet tugging, whatever the inherent design compromises. It is a heart over head machine, most certainly! ======= I think you miss one big point. When flying, one battery is not enough, and on the last 17 trips I have been on, there were not power plugs in coach! I typically carry an extra battery to make it through a cross country trip, and a large battery I plug into the power port is NOT the answer. Not very efficient. To get feet replaced in San Francisco took them two days. No one in the Apple Stores in the big cities does anything right away. My last repair took 6 days! And as has been said, you cannot change batteries when you need more power. This IS a deal breaker, because I wanted this and will not buy it! ======= Here is an interesting article on the Macbook Air: http://www.macworld.com/article/131696/2008/01/macbookair_faq.html I'm not a business traveler. I'm just a nuts-and-bolts technician, but I find the lack or a replaceable battery to be a "near fatal flaw". Not sure how else to put it. Will it fly with people who travel a lot, or will that lack of a replaceable battery sink the product? Wait and see I guess. Some of you are right, it's not cheap. But don't forget, a lot of people work in companies where image counts a lot. (Part of the "Form over function problem"?) Enough so that the companies will gladly buy their traveling executives the latest gotta-have-it thing, cost be damned. Of course, it could be a little embarrassing when a traveling executive walks into the meeting room, then sheepishly has to ask if there's a place he can plug in his Macbook Air, since the battery is out of juice, because he couldn't get a seat in business class or first class. Yee-hah. Perhaps a group feature, where Mymac staffers write what they think of the Macbook Air is in order. ======= Battery life is less of an issue than is being made of here, IMHO. 1) Without an optical drive, the MBA should have good battery life, even if the 5 hours claimed is hard to regularly achieve. I have MacBooks, Powerbooks, Dells and other here that do not get much past three hours, even with new batteries. So MBA should provide close to best of class on battery longevity, making the fixed power dependence less 2) It will still work fine with external battery devices - I picked up one myself while at MacWorld this time. A disc with an internal battery and standard socket in the middle, it gives around six hours total on my MacBook when paired with the internal battery - so an MBA should be a fair bit better. Yes, it adds to the overall weight, but given what I said in pint one I would not anticipate needing such a device all of the time, just for the longer trips Working in IT consultancy, I meet a lot of people with laptops. Relatively rarely, I find a person with more than one battery. Even more rarely than that is a person with more than one battery that uses them both regularly. I am sure the pros and cons of the MBA will be a primary discussion topic on the podcast this week... ======= > Battery life is less of an issue than is being made of here, IMHO.

Well friends, that all depends on the battery’s performance, doesn’t it?

Case in point: MacBook batteries are Scheißelumpen. (I just made that up, but I’ll bet our firend understands.) I’m about to buy my third battery in less than two years, and that absolutely sucks at over $120 a pop. When my old TiBook’s battery finally crapped out, I bought a Newer Technologies high capacity replacement at OWC, and THAT sucker is incredible: easily delivers almost 5 hours of running time, and that’s with full screen brightness.

For some reason, such 3rd-party batteries aren’t yet available for the MacBook. Grrrr…

As for the MacBook Air, I think it’s a fabulous machine (from a distance). I can see quite clearly its intended use and that’s just fine. Even if it doesn’t sell, it makes one helluva point: we don’ need no steenking DVDs! Um, except when we do, but that’s just in these early stages. But I would hate like hell to have to take or send one of these beauties all the way to Albuquerque (six hour round-trip) for a battery replacement. That said, one has other reasons to visit ABQ from time to time, so maybe this is just a stupid gripe.

The original issue here has more relevance (long flights), although in the same situation, I’d be catching 40 winks and not working on the airplane. The few times I do get to travel, I generally regard as periods of dispensation from having to get anything accomplished.

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I’ve been talking with someone at OWC/Newertech about a MB battery since July of last year. He keeps telling me it’s coming soon. I’m on the list to review one the instant it finally shows up. I guess they are working on it…

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I think Apple will do fairly well with the elegant new MB Air, as you and others have said concerning the executive business market and all the people that must have the cutting edge stuff.

But this whole thing is a moving target. In a couple of years Apple will upgrade to the MB Vapor, weighing 2 pounds and utilizing new nano battery technology giving more than 10 hours of use.

A couple of years after that, there will be a new MB Vacuum, weighing only a pound and made of a flexible and indestructable new polymer – it will hardly be there.

But IMO I think all laptops are going in this direction. It seems to be the future. You know how the future is, the future is never what it used to be when it finally arrives. =)

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MacBook Air — the new Cube (when all I wanted was a MacMini)….

Back around the turn of the century, Apple customers were demanding a nice, small, headless Mac. They wanted it versatile, low-cost, and would accept some limitations in expandability. There are lots of cases where a full sized PowerMac was too much, and an iMac (with it’s integrated screen) just wasn’t quite right.

Steve decided, as he often does, that customers don’t know what they were talking about. So he handed down from the mountain, a high- priced, closed, but ultimately stylish little remake of the NeXT Cube. This one was smaller, classier, and had better graphics. But alas, it had a high price, no real expandability, and was designed for a niche, but not general appeal. That niche was those that didn’t have much space, but wanted a display bigger than the iMac, and were willing to pay MORE than an iMac that came with a screen.

Sales were brisk at first, and quickly tapered off to unacceptable. Soon the product was killed.

Rumor is that a program manager risked job and reputation to go forth with what the Cube should have been all along. It was small, it was cheap, and it reflected what Apple had needed; an entry level machine. The cube was shown to Steve, and it was reluctantly agreed, that it was “cute”, and wouldn’t hurt the brand too much, so the MacMini was born — the bastard stepchild disliked by many of the elitist snobs in Apple. And it has gotten the attention, updates, and revisions that such a low machine deserves; despite being far more generally appealing, and outselling many other models, in spades. If the MacMini had some more expandability (say a PC-Card slot to allow some adaptation), it would sell even better, and help work against the “Apple is closed” reputation that the company has.

Now enter the MacBook Air. This is Steve’s re-attempt to prove the customer wrong again. Customers said they wanted a light portable, with some expandability. They loved the Duo’s — something that didn’t have it all with you, but you dock when you needed, priced at a reasonable threshold — since it comes with less in the way of I/O, it should of course start at a lower price.

Steve decided, again, that form is more important than function. Like the original iMac, he would yank out all ports that he didn’t think we needed. He would seal the battery in (in makes things smaller and more rugged, and lowers costs). Like the original Mac128, he’d solder on the memory, it saves some memory, space, and increases reliability. Then like the original Mac, when his engineers begged him to allow more expandability and he didn’t (almost destroying the platform), he decided that there shouldn’t be a dock port, two USB ports, or things that would make it more broadly appealing — it would be a niche product. They asked for small, so small was what they would get (nothing else), or else, “no soup for you!” Then, because it was so brilliant, they wouldn’t price it based on component costs, or good targeting; placing a more limited machine below more capable ones… they would price it so we could pay homage to Steve’s brilliance. Everything would be sacrificed as a design homage to thin. This created one of the sexiest, and most nichey, elitists products ever. You pay more and get less, it’s that simple. They couldn’t even brand it in a reasonable way and call it the MacBook Mini — it had to be as vaporous as it’s functionality, and be named “air”.

What will the results in the market be? I don’t know. Steve is a victim of his success. Apple makes some brilliant products, that are still a shadow of what they could have been, if we didn’t have some design-fascist cramming his ideal of utopia down the customers throats. The original Mac sold reasonably, in-spite of the limitations of no memory expansion, no hard-drive, no dock expansion, and limited I/O. Once Steve left, and we got the OpenMac (MacII and SE), then sales really took off. Steve created NeXT and the cube, and the idea of a closed box, with his short-sighted and slow optical-only drive, almost destroyed that company as well. The original iMac sold pretty well, but we’ll never know how much better it would have sold had he not yanked out the floppy port and allowed there to be a single slot. As someone who sold these machines, I know it would have removed the reasons claimed by 90% of the consumers when they walked away and bought something else. The same for the Mac Cube. And now, we’re back to the same old thing with the Air.

The engineers and nerds in all of us, know that computers and cars sell based on FUD. I’ll buy an SUV in case I want to go camping. “When was the last time you went camping or off-roading”, you ask…. “that’s not the point!”. And the same for the Air. 5 hour battery might be enough, but I won’t buy one because I might need a replaceable battery and can’t get one. I’ve almost never used my PCMCIA / PC-Card slot in the MacBook Pro — but I won’t buy a machine without it. I only need 2GB of RAM, for now… but I want the option of 4GB. I might not need a dock, but without the option, I’m not buying a limited second machine. Instead of doing good product design, and figuring out what customers want, and trying to appeal to as many of them as possible, Steve and the Air does the exact opposite. People have to work to justify why they will sacrifice X, Y and Z to get it — instead of Apple figuring out how they could give it to them.

I know that Apple could afford to charge less, and sell a lot more of them. (Helping the health of the Mac platform and Apple’s perception and stock valuation). I know that Apple could have put in a dock connector, or even a PC-Card slot, and that would have reduced the controversy and increase the market share and happiness of the consumers. Instead, I, and many consumers like me, will have to decide if we’re willing to make the sacrifices to get a MacBook air. And in the end, I think the Air will sell well, in spite of the limitations. Not because of them.

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I must respectfully disagree. I do feel that the non- replaceable battery is an issue. I also feel that someone here is onto something with is observation about form over function.

I really have no problem at all imagining this scenario:

A hot-shot executive has just traveled from New York to La-La land on the redeye. He has worked on his powerpoint presentation a lot during the flight, making sure everything is perfect. This is an important presentation. He makes it in plenty of time, and strolls into the paneled meeting room with confidence. He opens his Macbook Air, and ,,,,uh-oh. The battery is kaput. He sheepishly asks where he can plug in. The conference table is one of these enormous ones, and the nearest outlet is on the other side of the table, just a few feet beyond reach of the cord. It’s a full meeting, with lots of “corporate decorum” He cannot change seats. Oops. The other execs simply open up their various laptops, Vaios, Dells, and standard Macbook pros, with no problem. What happens after that is anyone’s guess, but it stands to reason that our traveling executive probably won’t make assistant vice president this year. (OK, I’m getting carried away here. )

Can anyone else imagine this happening, or am I just too cynical?

Yes, it’s an attractive product. I’m sure it feels nice on your hands. Yes, it tugs at the wallet, as others have noted. But, I’m simply not that impressed. And that is what I think. “Believe it, or not.” (Spoken in my best Jack Palance voice)

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There is a shortage of the batteries, which is why NO third party has them yet.

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A shortage of MacBook batteries, after a year and a half??

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No, out of the needed material needed to make them. And not just for Macs. Remember, there was a recall just last year for 8 million laptop batteries.

TO BE CONTINUED

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