Apple today announced the introduction of their Macbook Air – an ultraportable notebook that will excite the Mac fan boys over the coming days. It has everything that PC equivalents do not – cool design, a permanent fan base, and that little something extra. Most importantly, in direct disagreement of Devin Coldewey of Crunchgear, it does away with that fundamentally useless optical drive. Devin makes a big play for the fact that they see this as a massive mistake at the same time that he points out why it isn’t- ‘I don’t use my drive that much’.
I have a printer that I use with my laptop, but that does not mean that I would want one built in and definitely would not like the extra weight of that one. The same with the optical drive, in fact I use my printer much more than I use my DVD Re-writer.
Devin also makes a big play about the fact that it has a single USB2.0 port and that the laptop is not memory upgradable. This misses the point however, as this is an ultraportable and not a full desktop replacement. You are not supposed to try the forklifting of heavy graphics on this machine, nor connect a whole lot of directly connect devices. The stress is on the ‘Air’ – connections to peripherals over WiFi/Network connections. Effectively, this leaves the USB port for Mice and memory sticks – I think one is enough for that.
Now I am not a Apple Fanboy – I do not own a single Apple device, but I can appreciate the beauty and functionality of the Macbook Air and would be interested to see how the dependence on Wifi interconnect will be taken further by Apple beyond the Time Capsule. Let us see the responses from the Windows PC brigade to this notebook.
Me? I will continue with my adventures on the Asus EeePC for my ultraportable kick.
Update
Just learned that the Macbook Air is novel in another way – Apple has repeated the trick with the iPhone – the battery is not user replaceable. Now initially this seems awful, but then when was the last time that you replaced your battery before replacing your laptop? but then some need two or more batteries for that extra long run without mains power.
The key here though is that only a small percentage wish to have second batteries, but we will have to see how this goes over the coming months – the reception to this issue I mean. One other thing though, the price of the battery replacement seems to be priced well but not much info on how long the replacement would take…
