MacBook Air

[rocketman]

Apple - MacBook Air

It's a neat concept and an impressive feat, but frankly I don't know why Apple made this thing. I don't see how it fits in their current product line-up.

If I need a super tiny laptop, I don't want to carry around $2000 in hardware everywhere I go.

I was more impressed with their Time Capsule. A 1 TB wireless NAS for $500 is not a bad deal at all. Let's you wirelessly back-up your files automatically with Time Machine in Leopard.

Apple - Time Capsule

[iambrutus]

the built it for two reasons

1) to claim the worlds thinest notebook
2) to sell them to the people that have to have the latest/coolest toys

i agree that its very cool and agree that its fairly useless.

[Deety]

To install programs from disk, all you need is another computer! Um... okay.

It's cute and all, but 80GB doesn't cut it for a primary computer anyway, so I guess the market is people who only need it for a few things, but need to do those things in a snazzy sort of way. Not surprising they brought up presentations so often - seems well suited for a sales tool.

[OCBucksFan]

I have a 2 pound dell, tiny ass laptop, that I use for work a lot. It's nice when I need to do some network testing and the testing equipment in my tool box isn't enough. I don't know much about Mac networks, but I can guess that any admin would need some sort of access to administrate it, and when you're traveling all over to keep things running, installing new data center, etc... the lighter the better. The same can be said for sales people on the go, toss it into your brief case, doesn't take my space, plug it into a projector at the location and display your whatever...

[rocketman]

Originally Posted by Deety

To install programs from disk, all you need is another computer! Um... okay.

It's cute and all, but 80GB doesn't cut it for a primary computer anyway, so I guess the market is people who only need it for a few things, but need to do those things in a snazzy sort of way. Not surprising they brought up presentations so often - seems well suited for a sales tool.

To be honest, I think I've used the optical drive on my MacBook maybe a dozen times or so in the year and a half that I've had it. I might be in the minority because I don't watch any movies on my computer and download almost all of my software off the internet. The lack of an optical drive wouldn't be a deal-breaker for me, but the fact that, for the MacBook Air, I'd have to pay a huge premium to not have it is a pretty [censored]ty proposition. An Asus Eee PC is like $500 - if portability was the priority, I'd get that.

[Muck]

Originally Posted by rocketman

An Asus Eee PC is like $500 - if portability was the priority, I'd get that.

Bastard beat me to it!

I'm seriously thinking about picking one up to play with.

[Dryden]

Originally Posted by OCBucksFan

I have a 2 pound dell, tiny ass laptop, that I use for work a lot. It's nice when I need to do some network testing and the testing equipment in my tool box isn't enough. I don't know much about Mac networks, but I can guess that any admin would need some sort of access to administrate it, and when you're traveling all over to keep things running, installing new data center, etc... the lighter the better. The same can be said for sales people on the go, toss it into your brief case, doesn't take my space, plug it into a projector at the location and display your whatever...

One problem with the MacBookAir is that you don't have any connectivity options to do any of that. Most of my network troubleshooting requires not only RJ-45 wired ethernet, but a serial port too.

As for presentations, having done that gig for years, I wouldn't want to deal with all the damn dongles to have basic VGA or S-Video out. Just give me an old clunker that's durable and has eleventy-thousand ports built in to the back, plus two PCMCIA cards already setup to cover anything that it couldn't do out of the box.

No. This MacBook probably has few practical real-world