p2pnet news | Product News:- Expensive, suicidal home movies weren’t all Apple boss Steve Jobs had to offer at the Macworld Expo trade show.

He was also touting the company’s latest toy: a thin, $1800 laptop called the MacBook Air.

But “That piece of crap doesn’t even have an optical drive,” observed a p2pnet reader yesterday.

So? Thin calls for certain sacrifices and to, “reach his goal of making the industry’s thinnest computer, Apple’s designers made a series of trade-offs that the majority of laptop buyers may not appreciate,” the New York Times has Jobs saying, going on:

The computer uses a 1.8-inch disk drive, on which no more than 80 gigabytes of data can be stored. Memory is limited to a standard two gigabytes of RAM and its processor is slower than those of Apple’s other laptops. The design team jettisoned an optical disk storage device for playing DVDs. Mr. Jobs demonstrated a feature called Remote Disk that will make it possible to play the contents of a DVD via a wireless network from another Macintosh or Windows PC. Also, the MacBook Air’s battery is not removable.

Responding to a question about the growing array of media, including digital photographs, movies and music, that now swell most users’ hard drives, Jobs said, “Maybe this isn’t the computer for you.”

Even Macolytes are underwhelmed.

“Like most everyone else, I suspect, I was blown away by the MacBook Air’s reveal Tuesday,” writes Rob Griffiths in Macworld, going on:

“As a long-time fan of ultra-small notebooks (we still own and use a 12-inch PowerBook G4 in the Griffiths household), my initial reactions involved reaching for my credit card and loading Apple’s store in my browser.”

But then, “reason intervened”.

“So what happens,” he asked himself, “when the hard drive has an error and you have to reinstall OS X?” – going on:

OK, that seems easy enough. I’ll just boot off the Leopard DVD…oh wait, no, I won’t do that unless I fork over the extra $99 for the USB-powered SuperDrive. OK, so I’ll use FireWire Target Disk Mode…nope, won’t do that either, as there’s no FireWire port (and I confirmed with an Apple representative that there’s no ‘USB Target Disk Mode’ option.) And I won’t be able to use that cool and oh-so-handy ‘borrow a drive from another Mac’ feature, as the hard drive won’t be bootable. So barring the extra $99 for the SuperDrive, the only solution will be to boot from a USB2 hard drive that’s been prepared with a disk-based version of the OS X installer.

But really, how often does a hard drive get an error like this? Not so often, and $99 is a small price to pay for insurance, so the SuperDrive solves that problem. Time to order! ‘Not so fast, Griff! What about the hard drive space? 80GB isn’t much by today’s standards.’ While that’s true, in a small ultra-mobile Mac, I’m willing to take the tradeoff in drive space. Even on my MacBook Pro, I’m only using 85GB of the 120GB space I have available. So really, this isn’t a major issue – besides, I fully expect that some enterprising soul will demonstrate that Toshiba’s new 160GB 1.8-inch hard drive works just fine in the MacBook Air, and they’ll probably do so within a day or two of the machine’s availability in two weeks.

Time to order? Not quite.

“While Steve Jobs did point out that ultra-portables from other manufacturers involve tradeoffs (processor speed, disk space, screen size), he very conveniently neglected to mention the single biggest tradeoff with the MacBook Air: like the iPod, iPhone, and iPod touch, the battery in a MacBook Air isn’t user-replaceable,” says Griffiths.

So you’ve had it if the battery dies, or runs out, while you’re in the middle of something.

And natural degradation is another issue, Griffiths says, continuing:

According to Wikipedia’s entry on lithium polymer batteries, the life expectancy of such batteries is 24 to 36 months, with a claimed 80-percent capacity retention after 500 full charge/discharge cycles. Again, we won’t know how the MacBook Air’s battery holds up until its been in the field for a while, but it will definitely provide less than a five-hour charge as it ages. With Apple’s other laptops, this isn’t an issue as you can simply purchase a new battery and install it yourself. But what will one do with the MacBook Air? Will you have to send it to Apple to replace the battery? Will it be something that can be done while you wait at the local Genius Bar? Nobody knows, but clearly, it’s not something the consumer will be able to do at home.”

When something costs $2,000 or so, I expect that I’ll be able to use it for a number of years, and that I shouldn’t have to send it back to Apple for the equivalent of routine maintenance a couple times during that period.

But no worries. Macolytes will be lining up in droves to buy the computer.

No need to stay tuned.

Also See:-

suicidal home movies – More Apple CRAP – home movies, January 16, 2008
MacBook Air – Wired on MacBook Air, January 15, 2008
New York Times – Enhancing Its Hits, Apple Adds Movie Rentals, Ultralight Laptop, January 16, 2008
Macworld – MacBook Air: Holding my breath, January 15, 2008

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 7:42 am and is filed under Product News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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