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In-Depth Review of the MacBook Air With Photos
Engadget has the first really in-depth review of the MacBook Air that I have seen with plenty of great photos and specifics. They do a great job of highlighting the highs and the lows with plenty of concrete examples to back their claims up. It seems that while the MacBook Air is a great step towards ultra-portable computing, overall the pricepoint is just too high. Which is not surprising from a new Apple gadget I guess.
I thought it was a well thought out review. Carefully worded to back up every statement so neither the fanboys or haters could jump all over him as being biased. Though some probably will. Only thing that irked me was how there were several lines that go something like "unlike most ultraportables, the MBA has..." or "also rare in an ultraportable is...". Well, who started calling this 13.3" thing an ultraportable anyway?
Anyway, it did actually make clearer to me who would want this laptop.
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
Didn't you see the mag safe adaptor that comes with it? It's a 90 degree adaptor that fits while the MBA is on any flat surface. The one they showed on the edge of the table is the MB adaptor and they only show it so you can see how you have to use the MBA adaptor.
Pricepoint? The 90's called and they want their buzzword back. Gezzus, just say fucking "price". The amount something is for sale at is its price. Period. Sheesh.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Yes it comes with it's own power adaptor that is the small one shown next to the larger MB/MBP one in one of the pictures. I don't know why they complain about the other power adaptor besides just adding words to their article.
I just got back from the future, and in the post apocalyptic road warrior world to come, shiny discs will be the main form of currency. The richest people are those that never threw away their AOL CDs.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Well, considering that 4 GB SDHC cards are common, and currently only cost $30, I think that eventually giant (by comparison) DVD media will disappear. Sure it's too expensive now, but give it 5 or 6 years. I still want something that doesn't get damaged by scratching like MiniDisc, or SD. Maybe some kind of bluray tech in a MiniDisc formfactor would be nice.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Engadget has the first really in-depth review of the MacBook Air that I have seen with plenty of great photos and specifics. They do a great job of highlighting the highs and the lows with plenty of concrete examples to back their claims up. It seems that while the MacBook air is a great step towards ultra-portable computing, overall the pricepoint is just too high.
:-)
Great post!
OK, it is 20 times more expensive that a wooden-shafted version with a steel end, and it will only do the same work, but that's more than made up for by it's looks.
Did I mention it looks great?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The new MacBook Air will hopefully point laptop makers in the right direction: small and silent laptops. From what I can tell from the specs and the review, though, the MacBook Air is not as nice as the laptop on which I'm typing this: the Dell Latitude X1. Although the X1 is now out of production, it is still, in my opinion, the perfect laptop. Someone else has already taken the trouble of comparing the two machines. Here's the summary:
Dell Latitude X1 is smaller (albeit slightly thicker), has a gigabit ethernet port, comes with a external DVD burner, has two USB ports and and SD and a CF slot. The battery is easily removed and replaced or upgraded.
The MacBook Air has a dualcore 1.6 GHz processor where the X1 has a single core that clocks 1.1 GHz. Also the Air can take 2GB versus the 1.25 GB of the X1.
The X1 comes with an obligatory copy of Windows XP, but I upgraded it to Kubuntu Feisty. The MacBook comes with an obligatory copy of Mac OS X.
I have been developing KDE4 on my X1 just fine. The extra speed would be nice, but for a portable machine battery life is more important.
If the X1 were still in production, it would clearly be the better laptop.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
That article's a mess: poor grammar; photos that focus more on looking arty rather than providing information (the fourth one down is near useless); horrendous distortion in some of the shots (the second one down makes the screen look like it's melting); and attempts to make the writer look smarter by using fancy words that the writer doesn't even know the meaning of (you cannot have an eliolated CPU). If you can get past that though, the content's not bad. I'm curious about what battery life would be like with the brightness turned down, WiFi and BLuetooth off and just using Office/iWork for some actual work. Just using TextEdit I was able to get 8 hours out of my old iBook, but my MacBook can't stretch that far.
Lord knows I love all things Apple-y, but not the MBA. That being said, perhaps the MBA is a showcase machine, not really designed to be practical, but to show off new technologies for light laptops. And, unlike concept cars, you can drive this one home with you.
I guess that's positive enough spin :)
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
The other issue is that as the Mac hardware is essentially now the same as a PCs, there's not much stopping the likes of Sony from designing a similar form-factor laptop. Apple have proved the concept works, although I can envisage some people carrying around a bag of cables and adaptors to get the most out of it.
On another note, I was interested to see how Intel shrunk the Core 2 for the Air - it seems they shrunk the PCB block rather than the chip die itself, which would make shrinking it a lot cheaper overall. Very nice work though - hopefully it'll encourage them to make their chips smaller overall in future.
Well, there's me. The things that it lacks for me are...
Oh, and I also do video editing. And Logic Express for music work too.
Now don't get me wrong, the above wasn't an anti-MacBook Air rant and in fact I quite like the device. Those answers are specifically addressed to your question - "who are these power users?". One would be me. That's fine though, a MacBook Air isn't aimed at me whereas a MacBook Pro is. I'm actually fine with the no optical drive thing which others are seeing as such a controversy, but the other compromises are a bit too much for my usage.
Cheers,
Ian
You are seriously comparing a 1.1 GHz single core to a 1.6 GHz dual core? That's not even close to the same class of computing power.
Meanwhile, people are quibbling that the MBA is slightly slower than other Mac dual core laptops...
I actually did a price comparison on the vaio's and the Vaio's give you slightly more bang for the buck but at the cost of less battery life. All in all you are talking about ~$100 price difference. Apple also surprisingly has the least expensive 64gb SSDrive on the market. Hundreds less than retail and competitors.
What I want to know is does Intel and apple have an exclusive contract on that motherboard? or can Intel start selling those boards to anyone? in 6 months will sony be selling these? Better yet will someone merge one of these and an LCD TV to make turely interactive TV.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Apple disabled the booting of system CDs from USB CD drive a long time ago (required either a direct connect drive or fire wire) I figure the special CD drive changes the situation for the MacBook air.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
I was an Apple loyalist through the worst of times, I was first out the door to buy a Titanium laptop. I have diversified a lot in the last couple of years. Those things said, I really, really want to like the MacBook Air. It's a gorgeous machine. It evokes the same kind of visceral "must own" response that the original Titanium Powerbooks did. This machine makes too many compromises to be a primary machine for the serious poweruser or developer. No ethernet, no WWAN, no optical drive, no firewire and oddly no audio-in. In headier times, having one of these machines for sofa browsing would be great, but that's not where I am right now nor or most of the computing "professionals" that I know.
It's hard to know the target market for this machine, though it's clear the machine was designed for Steve personally. I'm sure that this machine will look great sticking out of the designer backpack on the passenger seat of a new 3-series BMW that Mommy and Daddy bought for college commuting, but it's hard to relate to a market that far removed from the kind of office that has machines in varying states of assembly. The MBA is a glorious consumer machine but the slashdot crowd is not the core market for this product.
Ultimately, the slashdot crowd isn't Apple's market at all and it's a happy accident for Apple that slashdot intersects with other products aimed at Apple's core demographics.
Yes, and then we would need some name for these "Compact" "Flash" media which are just like SD, but much sturdier, that still conveys that they are "Compact," "Flash" devices... :-)
As Engadget does too often for my taste, the review misses the point of this product entirely. Please pull your head out of the tech-sheets long enough to look at the thing as a 'product' not a 'laptop'
The MacBook Air is not for old-school hardware-centric geeks. Its not for 'road warriors'. In fact, I think the crafty (doubtless purposeful) acronym "MBA" should tell you alot. This product is designed for management types, social types, the fringe of the tech-savvy users. I will go so far as to say if you don't love the MBA, you're not in the the target market group. All the MBA nay-sayers remind me of film critics panning a movie like StarWars saying how trite, contrived, overstated, and juvenile it is. The fact is that for millions (billions?) of people, StarWars is the magnum opus of film. If you don't agree, you're not wrong, worse you're just he wrong reviewer, and too tunnel-visioned to realize it.
This article actually comes closest to the truth by repeating itself on how solid the keyboard/engineering 'feels'. Bingo! Two points. (I'd have to see the audio port in question- that sounds like a possible legitimate problem.) But look, the target market doesn't care about how much gigahurtses or how many RAMS it has... The target market for the MBA cares about looking really good at client meeting and having a beautiful, dependable machine. And by this measure, the MBA solidly delivers.
The only competent criticism I've seen from this review (or really from any review) is the lack of 3G/Edge built in for always-on internet. While I'm sure it would be a great boost to the product and the image of the MBA to have it, I say with almost certainty that this was an issue with the carriers, not Apple's engineers.
Finally a smidge about the tech: 2gb isn't enough for you? 2gb is overkill except for hardcore adobe geeks. I'm pleased they put that much in. MacBooks ship with 1gb, and almost nobody ever goes over 2gb. Remember, this is OSX, not Windows. Ethernet, HD, processor: all are ample for the aforementioned target market. No optical drive? for what? Who actually installs software after you buy the machine? Oh, I get one for $99? Should I buy two incase I need to install the software again? Are you familiar with the target market yet? This is a laptop for people who don't like computers, to love.
In virtually every review of any computer, with few exceptions, the reviewer treats the product as if it is intended to be of general use by all computer users. The truth is that no computer is of general use for everyone. People don't complain that the OLPC is underpowered, or lacks a DVD burner -- it is obviously targeted at a specific market segment. A Macbook Pro is also targeted at a different market segment -- one that attempts to replace a desktop machine, while sacrificing little along the way. The Macbook targets the cost-conscious portable computer user, who needs a machine that does a bit of everything, sacrificing perfection for cost. It's a heck of a bargain, and sells accordingly. The MBA targets a different market segment.
The MBA targets the upscale mobile user who needs a notebook for traveling, that sacrifices little in the uses one encounters while traveling. This would seem to hit the mark. How many people carry stacks of DVDs to watch while traveling? Especially when so much content is downloadable and with Apple pushing iTMS video rentals. I can easily see airport wifi video rental franchises catering to this market. Does it run Office? Yes -- either the OS X version of Office, or Windows via a variety of ways. Corporate email platforms supported? check.
The horsepower seems perfectly adequate to me, as I surf the web and am typing this on a 1 GHZ iBook G4 (my desktop machine is a venerable Powermac G5 dual 2 GHz machine, something that is pretty close the the MBA in horsepower). The 1.6/1.8 GHz Core Duo seems admirably powered to me, perhaps not to a full-time gamer, but THAT'S NOT THE MARKET THIS IS TARGETING.
If we compare the competition in this marketplace, the MBA seems very robust, with more horsepower, a better display, better keyboard, and a price that is comparable to its ultralite competitors as well. For a traveling business person, especially one with a corporate-supplied notebook, this would be a VERY desirable machine. Gotta have the corporate-approved Windows install? Install it via Boot Camp and run Windows, Apple is still happy to make the sale and get an entry into the corporate markets.
Watch and see if these machines don't start showing up at business conferences, or accompanying CEOs on weekend golfing boondoggles via the corporate jet. Or with journalists (broadcast and print) who travel a lot. Heck, a significant amount of production feature film editing has been done using less capable notebooks than this in the not-too-distant past -- although no one would use a machine of this performance level today, when others are better suited to the task (it's a DIFFERENT MARKET).
The biggest failure I can see, given the targeted market segment, is the lack of a cellular connection capability. And given that such a feature would lock one into a particular cellular network, I can understand the omission -- but a space to add such a card at a later time would have been nice.
Fer the FSM's sake, pull yer heads out and quitcher moanin about it not being the machine made personally for YOU. That machine does not exist, and likely never will. It's why we look at what's available and choose what best suits our needs. Just because I have no use for an OLPC or a high-end GPU, does not mean that those things are doomed to failure, it only means that I have no use for them. Nothing more.
If a given product satifies nobody's needs, or has a competitor that is superior in either price or fit, then it is in danger of failure. The Macbook Air is not.
It would've been nice if the battery was removable, but in the interests of a clean, thin design, they didn't decide to do it this way. Someone did point out that usually your laptop is dated/obsolete before the stock battery is dead anyways. However, apparently taking out the battery isn't that much of a chore, 10 case screws (00 Phillips, not even the fancy Torx screws used in other Apple laptops) and 9 holding down the Lithium Polymer battery pack which is REALLY thin. Gizmodo had some gutting/tear-down pics and a video up for awhile, but they look like they've been taken down (as they did it to their Apple Review unit, I'm sure Apple isn't too pleased about that). Here is a mirror of the video and pictures: http://groups.google.com/group/mac-book-air/web/macbook-air-tear-down-pictures Actually, that Google group site also has a nice list of alternatives to resorting to a USB Ethernet dongle and some solutions to the "no built in Wireless WAN (EVDO/WiMax)" issue: http://groups.google.com/group/mac-book-air/web/networking-tweaks
There are no stupid questions...just stupid people.
At 12.8x8.94x0.16~0.76, the Air takes up 52.63 cubic inches of space in a bag or briefcase. Your 12" PowerBook, at 10.9x8.6x1.18, takes up a whopping 110.6 cubic inches of space in the same container, or over twice as much room.
Further, the Air is only a third of an inch deeper (8.94 vs. 8.6), so in terms of depth (and in screen height when opened) they're functionally identical. As such, on a airline tray table they'd behave pretty much the same. (Since tray tables are typically 16.5" wide by 9.5-10.5" deep, the Air's extra width has little impact. Still room for it and a cup of coffee.)
Heck, going by the same calculations, the Air is even smaller than the Eee.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Knowing Apple, it probably is an exclusive contract on that particular motherboard. However, given the fact that Intel pretty much designed the thing, I think the could put out a different but similar form-factor motherboard in a couple months time. Knowing Intel, I can guarantee they'll be pursing that avenue. - Adam
The Computations of AdamR
http://www.adamreyher.com
"You can actually sell electronic gear on a level competitive with Dell, or anyone else. ... extremely cool, extremely well engineered electronics."
Typical financial analysis from someone whose probably only managed and owned a paper route.
The first point to consider is that if they concentrate on hitting Dell's price points they'll have to do the same as Dell and start going for the cheapest components they can find. They'll also have to cut R&D, design, and materials costs. As such, those "extremely well engineered electronics" will begin to be anything but.
And speaking of R&D, one has to remember that Apple, unlike Dell, has an entire operating system division to support. Cut costs and reduce margins, and ultimately you begin to cut out all of those things that make a Mac a Mac.
Next, what's wrong with being high-end? Do you see Lexus or Mercedes or BMW or Jaguar going after the econo-box market?
Further, you're making a common assumption that the "make it up in volume" approach always applies. Making more machines means higher fixed costs, as you need more factories, suppliers, shipping, management, etc.. And I'm willing to bet that Apple is already getting the best deals possible from its suppliers. Besides, do you know how many more machines they'd have to sell to make up the difference if they cut prices 30%?
Which leads us to the next point. You're assuming that price is the primary reason people aren't buying Macs. I mean, it can't be proprietary software needs, Window's requirements, comfort levels, corporate hardware requirements, existing software ownership, lack of games, or the "if it isn't broken too bad then there's no need to fix it" mentality.
If the market isn't ready to switch, then cutting costs simply means cutting revenues.
Finally, take a peek at Apple's stock performance vs. Dells. I'd say they're competing quite well.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Comparing the MBA an the Eee is, to say the least, unfair. One is an exercise on how little and inexpensive you can make a comlhted wighojf crjppling it completely. The MBA is a full featured notebook that runs pretty much anything a desktop Mac runs. It may lack an ethernet port, buf Apple considers wired networks legacy tech (at my home it mostly is and in most of my clients it's only for the desktops). Even my printer has 802.11. For those who need cabled ethernet, there is a USB thingie. As for the optical drive, the external USB one seems more than adequate.
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A review of the MBA at Tom's Hardware points out that there is NO Kensington lock point on the notebook.
OK - I've got an EEE and am not particularly inclined to buy a MBA, but I'm not sure about "feature laden". You've picked out some strengths - Ethernet, USB ports, portability and removable battery* but rather neglected RAM (512M vs 2G), storage capacity (4G vs 80G), CPU power (630MHz x 1 vs 1.6GHz x 2), screen (800x480 7" vs 1280x800 13"), trackpad (tiny with scroll area vs. humungous with multi-touch), keyboard (tiny vs. full size) and Bluetooth (none vs. 2.1EDR)...
Oh God, did I just try to compare specs on a £220 computer largely aimed at kids with a £1200 Apple aimed at jet-setters? The EEE is a credible "alternative strategy" if you want a second computer to travel with, but there's not much sense comparing feature lists - you'd use them in different ways.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.