MacBook Air: Looks nice, Steve, but I'll pass on the Kool-Aid this time

[thatcrazycajun]

(Reposted from junquegrrl's LJ replies) So yesterday Apple Inc. honcho Steve Jobs, as is his wont, dropped a bombshell of a new product announcement at the annual midwinter Macworld Expo in San Francisco: the thinnest, lightest laptop computer ever, the Macbook Air.

Pretty it surely is, as are all the things that come out of the House of Jobs. And thin and light it surely is; at its thickest point it measures only about 2/3 of an inch, and can be slipped into an interoffice envelope (though why anyone would send something this expensive—$1,799 for the base model—anywhere that way, or carry it around with such flimsy [non-]protection, utterly escapes me).

But even if I hadn't just bought a WinBlows laptop last month and/or didn't already have a Mac mini at home, this new toy has one big fat stinking deal-breaker from my POV: No CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive! You're expected to use Bluetooth or AirPort Extreme to pull files and install apps from elsewhere, and just rent or buy movies online and store them internally...or slave another computer's optical-disc drive to the Macbook Air using something called Remote Disc. The only way you can get anything into or out of the thing if the wireless dinguses stop working is to shell out more $$$ for an optional external peripheral. When you've just dropped $1,800 on a new piece of hardware, this is emphatically NOT something you want to hear.

 This is the latest iteration of the whole "come live in the wireless world with us cool kids" meme Jobs & Co. have been trying to force down all our throats since the first Mac came out with no floppy drive a few years back. Someone needs to whap Steverino over the noggin with the ole clue-by-four to make him once and for all realize that no, not all of us out here can afford the fancy super-fast T1 lines and terabyte hard drives he probably has in his office and at home, and we still need optical media, dammit!!

A successful business gives its customers what they tell it they need; it doesn't try to tell them what it thinks they need or don't. But apparently, this rule does not apply to Apple, such is its historic accumulation of coolth in the computing community and the business world...and the power of the patented Jobs Reality Distortion Field™.

Sorry...rant over now.

UPDATE, 1/17. 5:07p: ZDNet's David Morgenstern, who claims to have been watching Apple and the Mac market for over two decades, asserts in his latest blog article that anyone who gets upset that the MacBook Air doesn't have FireWire, CD/DVD drive, RAM upgrade slot etc. is being a dumbass. He sees this as being an "elite" machine for guys in corner offices who value style over substance and are more concerned with impressing others with their newest execu-toy than in actually getting work done. Is he right?

Comments

[darrenzieger.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was drooling over the "Air" yesterday for about 90 seconds, then I got to the part about no CD drive, and I felt like I'd been punched in the gut. I'm not even remotely in the market for an $1,800 laptop at the moment, but I was still crushed.

W. T. F?

Jobs has a remarkable ability to make this kind of shit work against all logic, but I don't think the Reality Distortion Field(TM) is powerful enough to avoid a fiasco on this one.

And frankly, I'm not even rooting for him this time. I still have a sentimental investment in Apple's fate (in fact, I'm very excited about my imminent return to The World of Current Macs when I pick up a Mac Mini in the next week or so), but this is just fucking stupid.

It's great to push ahead of the bleeding, curved edge of the envelope and all that; and no doubt the day is not too far off when computers configured this way will be completely practical. But it's just too fucking soon.

This kind of thing will make a lot more sense when optical media have been replaced by, say, something like SD cards as the standard distribution method for software. An SD card reader is a lot smaller and cheaper than an optical drive, with no moving parts to worry about.

In fact, I'm starting to wonder why there hasn't been a move to introduce SD cards as a software distribution option. Given the ability to cram at least a DVD's worth of data into a space an order of magnitude smaller than an optical disk, you'd think someone would be working on it. I should mention this to Anne, who might want to research it for her blog.

[mdlbear]

SD cards make a great distribution medium, but they're still too expensive. So are USB flash drives.

They're re-usable, of course, but as far as the publishers are concerned that's not an advantage. Might as well download and save the intermediate step.

[tarkrai.livejournal.com]

The thing to remember here is that Apple, just like any other company, has to go through cycles of development that turn into Cool Stuff(tm) that, while still pricy, many can afford to own.

Remember when they introduced SCSI? Or dropped the floppy drive? Both of those times we had this kind of shock- and in the end Apple ended up being the market leader on both technologies.

The Air is a first generation product of some really new technologies. Remember the 20th Anniversary Mac? They hardly sold any of them, but the technology that went *into* it revamped PowerBooks and eventually led to the iMac- both huge successes.

The Air is certainly *not* a first computer. It's a machine for marketing and sales weenies who have the bucks and a home or office base station. It's for CEO's (like Steve) to look cool. And the people who buy it will be financing the development of the Next Thing for the rest of us.

I agree that this MacWorld was long on form, and very, very, very light on substance. But, all things considered, I feel that it was a development year.

[mdlbear]

Last night I had my hands, briefly, on a Lenovo X40 with 3GB of RAM, 120GB of disk, and Ubuntu. Very sweet.

I think I know where my next work laptop is coming from