i visited the apple store yesterday to get some hands-on with the wee macbook air. i have very little actual need for such a machine, but damn is it excellent.
not quite enough for a main machine: there's no firewire port, so it couldn't support recording audio. and the screen may be a little too limiting to be able to run Eclipse/FlashBuilder and actually see enough of a file to code.
but aside from that, what can't it do?
- it seems fast enough for daily use for most tasks
- disk space is short, but it seems we're on the verge of a cloud-based revolution on which i could store the large music and photo libraries currently eating up a lot of space on my mbpro
- it lacks keyboard backlighting, but c'mon that's not a showstopper
- the screen, despite its small size, feels surprisingly roomy for most apps
the thing is hilariously portable. i could definitely see it as a business travel machine for me -- it could probably handle all but the largest Flex projects, I could get exchange email through the web (yuck, but still), and i could run open office if i really needed to edit Office docs. Assuming i could get a mini-display port to VGA cable for presenting, what's not to love?
Apple is pitching this as a laptop/iPad hybrid. I don't quite see that right now -- it seems all laptop and not iPad -- but Apple is dropping hints that Lion will add some iOS-ness to the device.
what I'd like to see hardware-wise, and frankly by now I thought this would be featured in all Apple laptops, is a 3G chip. I think it would make a lot of sense for this 11.6" MBA to be able to grab internet anywhere. maybe the next version?
9 comments:
how much is the baseline starting price, of the one you saw there?
Bluetooth tethering from iphone would be nice, instead of built-in 3G.
Joe, it's a shame apple refuses to publish prices on the web, isn't it?
If you get it... then do I get your "old" laptop?
no
joe, it was the 128 gig one i was looking at.
wouldn't BT be a lot slower, though? i can see why you'd want tethering, though, so you wouldn't need multiple data plans.
vendors *should* offer a single data plan for use across 3G-enabled devices for a single user. it's somewhat outrageous that they can be so obviously non-customer-focused, and get away with it. data=drug.
Or using iphone as a hotspot. BT is a lot slower than wifi, but is it slower than average 3G data?
Totally agreed that the plan-per-device model is customer-hating. It would be nice to see a vendor break ranks and gobble up market share with a friendly plan.
Ron,
didn't know if demand was driving higher prices on waiting list pre-orders locally.
Sorry that I asked.
stopped by the apple store again last night. ame is tempted to trade in her < 1 year old macbook for the 11".
i did a "start up a whole bunch of apps" test and was mightily impressed. now, this was not after a reboot, so it's very possible that some of these apps had been launched previously and were still cached. e.g. Mail app was *instant*, with 64 unread messages indicated in the icon immediately.
the newest version of Office for mac was installed, and i was mightily *unimpressed* at the launch speed of Word, Excel, and PP that i launched. ages. then again, maybe those had not been launched previously, but i rather suspect it's due to bloat.
what was certainly true is that, post-launch, i could not cmd-q to quit any of the Office apps. instead, i was greeted with one of those "handy" popups asking me if i wanted to open an existing file or create a new one from a template.
a couple of the Apple apps gave me the same kind of popup, but those apps could be quit with cmd-q.
i'm not wholly familiar w/ Apple's style guidelines, but i reckon MS failed on that one.
Post a Comment