As some of you may know the macworld expo was today, and as even less of you know I work at an apple store in california, and it was quite a sight watching all the employees and customers huddled around computers as live updates from bloggers at the expo were flying in. So anyway the biggest new announcement in the keynote was the new laptop: The Macbook Air. The world's thinnest notebook.

So anyway some quick numbers for those who care: .76 inches high 12.8 inches wide 3 pounds Ports: Micro-DVI (capable of composite, s-video, VGA, and DVI video out) 1 usb port Headphone/Audio out

Here is the ad:

You can get it in an 80 gig traditional harddrive or a 64 gig solid state harddrive


The Good:
It's absolutely amazing. Those who haven't seen the ad I've linked to go back and see it. How they can fit a processor, hard-drive, memory and all that other good stuff in that tiny thing is beyond me, and your not sacrificing anything for it either. It comes with 2 gigs of memory, and you can get up to 1.8 GHz which isn't that great compared to other mac portables like the macbook pro but certainly is better than some other laptops on the market.

It comes with a built in iSight too which is great. When they first put them in the iMacs i was amazed that they could put a webcam in that small thing and then when they fit them in the Macbooks and Macbook pros I was even more amazed but this is the thinnest of them all.

Another cool feature is the multi-touch trackpad. Apple has had something similar with its other portables, with two-finger scroll, but this lets you zoom and rotate just by using your fingers on the trackpad.


The Bad:
Now as much as I love sleek ultra-portable laptops I must say this is not for me. For one thing is the lack of a cd drive. I completely understand that it was hard enough putting all of that in the laptop that thin but this just seems like a hassle to me. They have a few solutions but they are not as convenient as having a CD drive. One is an external drive that costs $99, but lugging around extra stuff defeats the purpose of an ultra thin laptop. The other is if you have another computer (mac or pc and I'm not sure about linux) you can put your cd or dvd in that drive and the macbook air can read and install software off of it. Now I besides the fact that they probably couldn't fit it in there I think I see another reason behind this. Apple (as well as almost all computer companies) are going away from physical media. They are trying to make CDs/DVDs a thing of the past. Apple announced that you can now rent movies directly from the iTunes music store. I think they want to have everything soon be streaming off the web instead of a physical copy.

Another annoying part is the lack of ports. It has no firewire, no audio in, no ethernet, no sd card expansion slot (or whatever those things are called) which are on the macbook pro's, and only one usb. Now the one usb is OK because if you have something that ultra-portable you don't want all kinds of devices plugged into it, but I would have liked to have seen at least a firewire port to access some firewire external drives. Although you can access one by plugging it into another computer and accessing it wirelessly this makes it much slower than firewire actually is.

Also, you can't access the battery. It is built in. Apple has said that batteries will cost $125 and it will be free for the battery to be replaced, but there is still the hassle of bringing it into a mac store and having the battery swapped out.

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SO... all in all I think this is an amazing laptop for those who want something portable. Those who are always bringing their laptop around with them and just need a computer to use on the go, even for processor intensive uses, such as some gaming and perhaps some video editing, but if you are looking for a laptop to use as a replacement for a desktop this is not it. If you have any comments go ahead and post them...

This post has been edited by alex7h3pr0gr4m3r: Jan 16 2008, 05:10 PM

Apple has recently introduced the MacBook Air in MacWorld 2008. It claims to be the thinnest laptop in the world. However, I have some comments:

First of all, it lacks an Optical drive. While some people say that it might be a good idea to start phasing out unnecessary hardware, I think it is too early to remove the optical drive, especially since so many people still burn DVDs. You can connect a USB adapter to solve this problem.

Second, it has no Ethernet cable. Again, it might be obsolete, and most people use Wireless networking, some places still need the Ethernet cable. This can be solved with a USB adapter. Because of the product's curves, there aren't flat spots on the side for ports, as there are on existing Mac laptops. On the left side, near the back, is a slightly recessed space on the MacBook Air's underside with a MagSafe power connector.

PC World says that "at the risk of sounding obvious, the MacBook Air is incredibly light and tiny. Its looks owe a lot to the MacBook Pro and previous silver Mac laptop models, but its curved edges and tapered shape are unlike anything we've seen on a Mac laptop in a long time, if ever." It seems like the MacBook Air has focused a lot on design.

Also, the MacBook air has pretty low specs. It only has 1.6ghz Intel Duo Core, when most laptops are already above 2.0ghz. It has 2GB of RAM, which isn't THAT bad. It also has only 80GB of harddrive space. You can extend it with an optional 64gb SSD drive, but that costs 1000$.

The worst thing is that the MacBook Air costs 1799$ for the cheapest version. This is in my opinion, a large ripoff.

Overall, for the first day, MacBook Air has not been doing very well. Apple's stock dropped quite a few points today.

References: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,141398-c...ks/article.html

I don't think the specs are THAT bad lol, but for that price, I'd want something a little better. I would only buy it if it had more than two USB ports. The thing with apple is, they get so excited about how they've designed something revolutionary and don't fix the hardware issues until they know the device is going to sell, then they release upgraded versions. Kind of reminds me of the iPhone...

Well first off what a waste of money it is as it's like giant, expensive router with limited features. Of course looking at the specs this laptop hardware design is like 5-6 years old mixed with 3 year old technology with a little bit of whats needed now. Basically what I am saying is that they have a slow processor with a dual core processor with 2Gbs of RAM that is practically needed to run any current system smoothly. However, I think with the phasing out of certain hardware I think its more along the lines of taking it out of the computer and then just connect it externally like hard drives, floppy drives, and I do believe optical drives as well. Either way I think Apple is going to get hit hard by this flop and if does become a successful machine well then kudo's for them.

I'm not quite sure if this is going to be a flop or not. I would bet not. Alot of people just want an ultra-portable for just surfing the net, notetaking, and perhaps some other activities. It may not be for people who are gamers or graphics designers but for an average computer user I think it will be a major success.



Oh and that would have nothing to do with the mba seeing as it doesn't even ship out to the apple stores until february.

This post has been edited by alex7h3pr0gr4m3r: Jan 18 2008, 05:34 PM

Personally, I do not like this. Once you have plugged in your USB printer, there is nothing else that you can plug in, eg.. you want photos from ur fone and u cant have both plugged in, so u have to put fotos from fone on THEN start printing em all, when it could take nearly half the time. Also, is it slow.... there no way that it could be as fast as a normal laptop. And maybe there would be issues with it being so small, is it weaker than normal ones.... I personally would go for a normal laptop. The worst con is that it doesnt have windows

just got the spam mail in all my mails about the mac book

i dont think is that great but finally mac came up with good looking laptop