Several people simply wanted an updated version of the 12" PowerBook to handle the "airline tray table" problem. Then again, although the Air is two inches wider than the PowerBook, it's almost exactly the same depth. And since the depth translates into screen height, I don't see any issue as to why the Air would be "too big" for a tray table.
My 17" MBP is certainly too large to work comfortably, but my earlier 15" PowerBook worked fairly well, and the Air is smaller than it was.
The Air is about 2" wider than the 12" PowerBook, but almost the same depth... and then there's the thickness (thinness?). Do the math, and you'll see that the Air is about 52 cubic inches in volume, while your "smaller" PowerBook comes in at a whopping 110 cubic inches.
Or to put it another way, the Air is 50% smaller than the PowerBook. Important when putting it into a briefcase or backpack. Heck, it's even 20% smaller than the Asus Eee.
Actually, on the 9th I posted an article predicting that Apple would use 1.8" notebook drives, as SSDs of any reasonable size were still commanding a premium price. To be fair, however, I also predicted that they'd add 16GB or so of on-board flash in order to cache system and application files. Nailed the first, missed the cache.
Then the day before MacWorld I did an article on The Totally Wireless MacBook, describing a machine with no ports whatsoever and that did everything via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
And then we got a wireless machine with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and which dropped almost all of the ports except for one USB port, one micro-DVI port (for presentations), and a headphone jack.
"If you were paying for what you used... so you would use more P2P!"
As I've said before, if most people had to pay on a per-MB basis, or the same on a per-MB/upstream-only basis, then there wouldn't be as much P2P traffic, and ISPs wouldn't have to spend boatloads of money on traffic shaping and filtering.
Not many people are altruistic enough to spend their own money to give everyone else free content.
You don't get "unlimited" electricity or "unlimited" water, as there's a finite amount of both available. Instead, one pays for what they use. Use less, and you pay less. Why should bandwidth be any different?
If you need it, there's an USB-to-ethernet dongle available. But the point you may be missing, and that the parent certainly missed, is that this is an auxiliary computer.
Take to meetings or lunch or wherever to take notes, write your novel on it while at Starbucks, catch a flick on the plane, and then come home to your REAL computer, an iMac or a Mac Pro.
And if he needs an "all-in-one" that's his sole computer/desktop replacement, then the Air isn't for him. Buy a 17" MBP.
"At the end of the day, FOSS is simply cheaper, so in a recession it becomes more acceptable in order to save costs."
One can argue TCO issues, but those aside, my point still stands. Companies can stop supporting FOSS, and can "save costs" by cutting their own developers and letting someone else do the work for free. Further, if you're not employed, odds are that you're not going to be able to just sit at home writing code with your "greater free time", but are going to be out trying to find work or doing whatever it is you CAN find, be it greeting customers at Wal-Mart, digging ditches, or asking if they'd like fries with that.
Sorry, but I don't think the standard FOSS party line applies here.
Yeah, and equally dumb. In both cases the manufacturer had to build it and pay for parts and materials and processing and all of the other costs involved, and you have the entire end product sitting there, whether you're using it to its full potential or not.
I may only use four of my eight cores most of the time, but there are eight of them there, nonetheless.
"Putting that bag through the scanner doesn't really add any time."
Everything you do in line takes time. Navigating it through the line, putting it up on the conveyor, the operator scanning it instead of the briefcase behind it, taking it down, opening it for a search, arguing about how many ounces of aftershave you're carrying.
It adds up.
Plus, as you mentioned, the time you spend waiting in the plane's aisle. I bet airlines could turn gates around 20-30 minutes faster without everyone carrying on their bags.
"Allow one purse and a briefcase or small backpack. That's it."
Put your precious notebook in there.
Allow no carry-on LUGGAGE, as in wheelies, suitcases, night cases, garment bags, duffle bags, shoulder bags designed for clothing, etc..
Again, it's one of those situations where someone's "right" to attempt to carry everything on board delays and inconveniences everyone behind them. It was fine when just a few people did it, but now it's gotten out of control.
We did without carry-on luggage before. We can do it again.
Allow one purse and a briefcase or small backpack. That's it.
Security lines will be faster, and embarking/disembarking the plane will be a HELL of a lot faster without some 5" 2" businesswoman trying to wrestle an oversized wheelie bag, a briefcase, her coat and her purse into an overhead bin originally designed for just the coat.
I'd rather take the risk of a lost bag (which has happened exactly once) than spend an extra hour getting on and off the plane each and every time I fly.
Crashing into a skyscraper's been done. Then again, car bombs and suicide vests have also been "done", but still continue to be used to make a statement and to sow death and destruction among one's enemies.
Besides, next time perhaps they'll fly a FedEx cargo jet into a nuclear reactor containment building, or a LNG transport, or a chemical plant.
The price for the players will most certainly drop, but high-definition is the content industries' secret weapon.
Consumers have historically resisted every attempt by the industry to raise prices on DVDs, and competition has in fact lowered them. As such, we pay much less for a DVD today that we did a decade ago, despite that fact that inflation should have boosted the price of a disc along with most everything else.
But high-definition kills two birds with one stone: It provides a rationale for higher prices for a "higher quality" product and no so incidentally lets us pay for our favorite movies yet again in yet another format.
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Yeah, and when the MBA's battery runs out, just sit back and watch a couple of movies on your iPhone. ;)
Several people simply wanted an updated version of the 12" PowerBook to handle the "airline tray table" problem. Then again, although the Air is two inches wider than the PowerBook, it's almost exactly the same depth. And since the depth translates into screen height, I don't see any issue as to why the Air would be "too big" for a tray table.
My 17" MBP is certainly too large to work comfortably, but my earlier 15" PowerBook worked fairly well, and the Air is smaller than it was.
Where did you get the numbers for the 6-hour/SSD option?
The Air is about 2" wider than the 12" PowerBook, but almost the same depth... and then there's the thickness (thinness?). Do the math, and you'll see that the Air is about 52 cubic inches in volume, while your "smaller" PowerBook comes in at a whopping 110 cubic inches.
Or to put it another way, the Air is 50% smaller than the PowerBook. Important when putting it into a briefcase or backpack. Heck, it's even 20% smaller than the Asus Eee.
Blew the link to the first article. Want A Small Thin Light Notebook? Here's How.
Got to learn to use Preview.
Actually, on the 9th I posted an article predicting that Apple would use 1.8" notebook drives, as SSDs of any reasonable size were still commanding a premium price. To be fair, however, I also predicted that they'd add 16GB or so of on-board flash in order to cache system and application files. Nailed the first, missed the cache.
Then the day before MacWorld I did an article on The Totally Wireless MacBook, describing a machine with no ports whatsoever and that did everything via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
And then we got a wireless machine with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and which dropped almost all of the ports except for one USB port, one micro-DVI port (for presentations), and a headphone jack.
Still no SuperDrive docking station though. Drat.
'Half the price, and none of this one-button-mouse crap."
I'll take guestures over an extra mouse button any day of the week.
"If you were paying for what you used ... so you would use more P2P!"
As I've said before, if most people had to pay on a per-MB basis, or the same on a per-MB/upstream-only basis, then there wouldn't be as much P2P traffic, and ISPs wouldn't have to spend boatloads of money on traffic shaping and filtering.
Not many people are altruistic enough to spend their own money to give everyone else free content.
You don't get "unlimited" electricity or "unlimited" water, as there's a finite amount of both available. Instead, one pays for what they use. Use less, and you pay less. Why should bandwidth be any different?
If you need it, there's an USB-to-ethernet dongle available. But the point you may be missing, and that the parent certainly missed, is that this is an auxiliary computer.
Take to meetings or lunch or wherever to take notes, write your novel on it while at Starbucks, catch a flick on the plane, and then come home to your REAL computer, an iMac or a Mac Pro.
And if he needs an "all-in-one" that's his sole computer/desktop replacement, then the Air isn't for him. Buy a 17" MBP.
Ummm.... wouldn't you leave that connected to the 30" monitor?
"At the end of the day, FOSS is simply cheaper, so in a recession it becomes more acceptable in order to save costs."
One can argue TCO issues, but those aside, my point still stands. Companies can stop supporting FOSS, and can "save costs" by cutting their own developers and letting someone else do the work for free. Further, if you're not employed, odds are that you're not going to be able to just sit at home writing code with your "greater free time", but are going to be out trying to find work or doing whatever it is you CAN find, be it greeting customers at Wal-Mart, digging ditches, or asking if they'd like fries with that.
Sorry, but I don't think the standard FOSS party line applies here.
Yeah, and equally dumb. In both cases the manufacturer had to build it and pay for parts and materials and processing and all of the other costs involved, and you have the entire end product sitting there, whether you're using it to its full potential or not.
I may only use four of my eight cores most of the time, but there are eight of them there, nonetheless.
"The same gear needed to make a good website ... "
I can use iWeb to make a web site, GarageBand to make a music CD, PageMaker to do a brochure, or Final Cut to make a movie.
But whether or not ANY of them are "good" in any way, shape or form is another matter entirely. Skill, talent, and training still count after all.
In fact, as the tools advance technically to the point where "anyone" can use them, such things are needed even more. Remember Sturgeon's law.
"... unnecessarily means developed by volunteers?"
Kind of the point, isn't it? A large portion of open-source work is done by corporations, or to put in another perspective, by patrons.
And if the patrons begin hoarding their cash and cutting expenses, is open-source work the last thing to go... or the first?
Doesn't matter where you live, as the parent was quoting the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992. US law.
"And yes, I am a cryptography expert with experience in steganography."
And if your new iPod or Zune rejects corrupted watermarks?
You can make a copy... for your own personal use. Making copies and giving them away to "friends" is infringement.
"My laptop bag definitely does not fit under "small backpack""
I suppose you're going to say it doesn't qualify as your briefcase either.
At any rate, it's odd, because I travel with a full-sized 17" MacBook Pro, and it fits just fine into a small North Face backpack.
"They have size restrictions on carry-ons as is, they should be sufficient."
Unfortunately, as I pointed out, they're not.
Since your child is supposed to have his own seat, he (she) can have his own bag. One per person, remember?
Next problem.
"Putting that bag through the scanner doesn't really add any time."
Everything you do in line takes time. Navigating it through the line, putting it up on the conveyor, the operator scanning it instead of the briefcase behind it, taking it down, opening it for a search, arguing about how many ounces of aftershave you're carrying.
It adds up.
Plus, as you mentioned, the time you spend waiting in the plane's aisle. I bet airlines could turn gates around 20-30 minutes faster without everyone carrying on their bags.
Where did you stop reading? Here, let me help:
"Allow one purse and a briefcase or small backpack. That's it."
Put your precious notebook in there.
Allow no carry-on LUGGAGE, as in wheelies, suitcases, night cases, garment bags, duffle bags, shoulder bags designed for clothing, etc..
Again, it's one of those situations where someone's "right" to attempt to carry everything on board delays and inconveniences everyone behind them. It was fine when just a few people did it, but now it's gotten out of control.
We did without carry-on luggage before. We can do it again.
Here's an idea: no carry-on luggage. Period.
Allow one purse and a briefcase or small backpack. That's it.
Security lines will be faster, and embarking/disembarking the plane will be a HELL of a lot faster without some 5" 2" businesswoman trying to wrestle an oversized wheelie bag, a briefcase, her coat and her purse into an overhead bin originally designed for just the coat.
I'd rather take the risk of a lost bag (which has happened exactly once) than spend an extra hour getting on and off the plane each and every time I fly.
Crashing into a skyscraper's been done. Then again, car bombs and suicide vests have also been "done", but still continue to be used to make a statement and to sow death and destruction among one's enemies.
Besides, next time perhaps they'll fly a FedEx cargo jet into a nuclear reactor containment building, or a LNG transport, or a chemical plant.
That hasn't been "done".
Simple solution. Unlimited downloads, uploads capped per month and then charged on a per-megabyte basis.
Do you think the average person is going to spend his own money so that other people can get their music and movies for free?
The price for the players will most certainly drop, but high-definition is the content industries' secret weapon.
Consumers have historically resisted every attempt by the industry to raise prices on DVDs, and competition has in fact lowered them. As such, we pay much less for a DVD today that we did a decade ago, despite that fact that inflation should have boosted the price of a disc along with most everything else.
But high-definition kills two birds with one stone: It provides a rationale for higher prices for a "higher quality" product and no so incidentally lets us pay for our favorite movies yet again in yet another format.
See: The Blu-Ray/HD DVD War: Defections And Betrayals