In LA

The new Macbook Air. Tiny. Great for businessfolk on the go. I wish I could use it, but it’s not an option for me or many other media professionals due to the fact that it cannot be connected to audio and video devices over firewire, lacks gigabit ethernet, and has an Intel integrated graphics chipset. Here’s a more detailed list of my thoughts.

The Great

• Really really tiny for its size –.76″ thick at the back, .16″ at the front. Less than 3 pounds. Should be fun to carry around. I want.
• 45W power supply –should not cause Airplane power outlets to shut down nearly as often as does the MacBook Pro’s 85W power adapter, and the 45W adapter probably takes up much less space in a bag than its chunky 85W cousin. With any luck Apple will go with a thinner and longer power supply to match the laptop’s shape. Has anyone seen the power supply?
• Full size keyboard –Thank god. I’ve used the tiny keyboards on the Sony Vaio subnotebooks, and I can’t say I enjoyed the experience. Yuck.
• 13.3″ 1200×800 resolution LCD screen. LED backlit for instant illumination, low power consumption, and better recyclability (no mercury).
• Runs OS X –I like OS X. It’s Unixy, like my NetBSD box, only with a pretty and functional interface.

Neutrals

• No optical disc –but the MacBook Air comes with new software that allows you to access optical drives on other computers (OS X or Windows) over the wireless network.¹ In all the news about this product that I’ve read and heard, Apple’s people have been careful to only use the word “access”, which to me implies that it is unlikely that it will be possible (at least with this first version of the software) to burn discs on remote computer’s optical drives from a MacBook Air. Apple is likely betting most MacBook Air purchasers either already own a Mac or PC with an optical drive, already download install most of their software over a network, or will buy Apple’s “MacBook Air SuperDrive” for $99. Perhaps other brands of external USB drive will also be supported by the MacBook Air’s version of OS X for reading and writing to discs.
• Storage: slow and fragile vs. fast, non-volatile, and very expensive –1.8″ 80Gb hard drive (standard) or 64Gb flash-based drive. 1.8″ hard drives of the sort used in iPods are slower and more fragile than 2.5″ laptop hard drives, which are in turn less robust than the 3.5″ hard drives in desktop computers. That’s why your friend’s 2-year-old iPod sometimes doesn’t boot, and freezes, and skips. Of course, the small machine requires smaller drives, and this tradeoff is a necessary evil. Data backups will be very important for users of the MacBook Air who opt for the internal hard drive. It’s likely that the hard drive is a stopgap measure and the flash drive, now optional, is the future for this product. Flash drives, like Samsung’s SSD flash drives, use less power than conventional hard drives, provide greater speed, have no moving parts, and have longer life and greater reliability than tiny hard drives. The only problem is that they’re maddeningly expensive right now. Want a flash drive with 14Gb less space than the stock 80Gb hard disk in your Macbook Air? That’ll add $999 to your order.

Negatives

• No Firewire –a dealbreaker for me. Lack of a Firewire 400 port means I can’t use the MacBook Air for video capture, can’t connect external drives of usable speed for video work, very likely can’t boot from external drives, and can’t use Firewire target disk mode for diagnostic and data recovery purposes. Audio professionals, who could probably make use of a silent flash-based tiny laptop for field recording, are also out of luck since most professional audio interfaces require Firewire.
• No ethernet port –not a big problem for business travelers and the average user, since they can get by with wifi or with Apple’s USB 10/100Base-T ethernet dongle, but us media types really like our gigabit ethernet to copy our big files or even use them over a network, and you can’t do that over USB 2.0.
• Not the greatest graphics processor (GPU) –a dealbreaker for me is that the laptop uses an Intel integrated graphics chipset. As far as I know none of the Intel integrated chipsets are usable or certified for use with two applications I use frequently: the Final Cut Studio suite’s “Motion” and “Color”.
• No expansion slot –I didn’t expect one in a subnotebook, but the fact that expansion is only possible through the USB2 port is unfortunate. An ExpressCard slot would offer 2.5 Gbit/s of bandwidth, USB 2.0 only does 480 Mbits/s peak. I wouldn’t bother dreaming of USB 2.0 gigabit ethernet adapters or USB 2.0 eSata adapters, such would be pointless. I could live with this deficit for the size.
• No Firewire port –did I say that already? It still bugs me. A lot.

Ah well. This will be an awesome machine for any non-media-professional who travels a lot or would like a lighter and thinner laptop. It’s a very capable computer for its size.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Apple rumor, Macintosh, OS X, unix

1. they never do say whether running this software to make one’s mac or PC host its optical drive for use on a MacBook Air means that the host machine can’t itself use the drive [↩]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 8:10 pm and is filed under Apple, Design, Geeky, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.