2 February 2008
On convergence: why I have already ordered a MacBook Air
I have just ordered a MacBook Air (the slower version with the 80Gb hard-drive, rather than the faster version with the solid-state storage), and if you judged orders by the number of positive reviews on the web, you’d imagine that I’m the only one to have ordered one of these.
Most of the criticism of the MacBook Air is from people who would like to use one as their only PC — for storing an iTunes library, for running heavy-duty graphics or video software, and so on.
Me, I already have a machine to do this — my 24-inch iMac — and so what I’m looking for in a little laptop is a bit different.
The biggest single appeal of the MacBook Air to me is the weight — although I would have been even happier with a smaller overall size (maybe something like the old 12” PowerBook), I can live with a full-size laptop so long as it’s light. My venerable workhorse 15” PowerBook (just entering its seventh year of near-constant use) was great, but it was heavy, and although it was of a size that I could happily toss it in my backpack/cabin bag/overnight bag/briefcase, I’d know it was there through the extra weight.
Secondly, I like the idea of a machine made for the wireless age. I can’t remember the last time I spent any time on a laptop tethered to an ethernet port (except for a crappy hotel in Sydney that can remain nameless), so I’m very happy with a machine that only has wireless connection options.
I would have been even happier with a mobile network option built in (GPRS like my BlackBerry — or, even better, 3G), but, again, there are ways to work around this, like tethering the MacBook to the Blackberry with Bluetooth and sharing its connection that way.
And although I love watching movies on my laptop while I’m travelling, I’m also more than happy to make a disk image of the DVD and sync that to the MacBook Air for watching on the road.
So, even though there are a few things that I would have been even happier with, the MacBook Air is a pretty good fit for what I’m after — in essence, a satellite laptop for my main system.
I’m planning to set up a sync script that will synchronise my Home folder (~/Home), minus my iTunes library and photos, between the MacBook Air and the iMac.
And this brings me to the question of convergence, and, I suspect, why so many people are turned off the MacBook Air by its seemingly-meagre specs.
I don’t want a laptop that will do everything. I don’t need a laptop to do everything. For music while I’m travelling, I have an excellent iPod video with longer battery life than the MacBook. I don’t need to sync the iPod while I’m away, so there’s no need to have my iTunes library available on my laptop.
I don’t need a CD/DVD burner available while I’m travelling. I don’t need a Photoshop workstation while I’m travelling. A
All I really need is a light-weight, robust machine that will let me download photos from my Nikon DSLRs, check my email, write some blog posts and travel notes, and watch a few movies in my hotel room.
This new laptop from Apple does all that — and for everything else, I have devices to do that for me …