At Macworld we were all surprised by the radical announcement of the MacBook Air?? Well, not really as we had heard the rumours and had seen the mockups. Steve’s big thing about this little product was exactly that, it was little. The really annoying thing about it being little is in my opinion it is little in the wrong way, it needs to be 12″.
The Specs
Well it has a weak 1.6Ghz or a still poor 1.8GHz as it’s second option, this is not good if you want to do any hard core stuff, but will suffice for the basics such as email, the web and iTunes and that is about it. It is not a power machine it is a light weight portable notebook.
I was surprised to find out that it had 2GB of RAM in it, for such a small machine that is a lot of RAM.
The 80GB drive, people complain that this is to small, I had a laptop with an 80GB drive and had 40GB free, so stop complaining there are things called external hard drives!! The 64GB SDD this to me is a leap forward. Apple are often the leaders in integrating new standards into their products and this is just the begging for SDD and with it’s falling prices I can’ wait to see it in more products.
The Looks
The sexy aluminum case looks great, just like the MacBook Pro’s and the black chicklet MacBook keyboard make it a smooth finished laptop. There have being rumours of a new MacBook Pro but if there is, then I reckon there will be a similar keyboard to the MacBook Air’s and a slightly restyled case. The curved edges looks great and the flap down ports is really clever but there is one thing that bugs me and that is the charger and it’s silly grooves there are grooves on the thick part by the charger head and that bugs me but is no reason not to get one.
Other Features
To be honest I think that the multi gesture touch pad is not an amazing feature because I don’t want to do gestures on a touch pad I want to do them on the screen of the device and they have all this touch technology with the iPhone why not put a touch screen on.
Remote disc the revelation in wireless disc technology, it sounds great but is a bit of a shame you can’t watch DVD ect..
The Super Drive this is a bit of a disappointment because magically the MacBook Air has a super charged USB port so it only works on that and it cost a bomb.
Overall
When Steve was on stage and announcing it we all went wow this is cool I want one, now the so called “Job’s Effect” was warn off, I find myself wandering who this laptop is aimed at? Well it is aimed at the person who has cash and travels away every other weekend and wants to take proper email and web and do some text editing and most of this can be done on the iPhone so that leave it as a pointless device. I personally would have been happier if Apple had made a 12″ PowerBook remake. It also has a lack of ports such as ethernet and it only has 1 USB port. There is another problem with it, you can’t upgrade anything that really sucks and for these reasons I would not get one.
