As an Apple fan who recently bought a tiny Asus eeePC laptop, I was frankly dreading today’s MacWorld Expo. Everyone seemed to be saying that Apple would also be bringing out a tiny laptop too. I could only hope it would cost a shade more than the £200 my Asus cost me.
Well, yes. Just a mere £1000 more than that. You can buy 6 eeePCs for the price of one MacBook Air.
Phew.
Oh, and unlike the eeePC, the MacBook Air has no ethernet socket, no microphone socket and only one USB socket (the eeePC has three). The eeePC weighs 920g to the MacBook Air’s 1.3kg. Both have built-in webcams and microphones. And I don’t see an SD card socket in the Apple gizmo…
I can’t really see who the MacBook Air is aimed at. PowerBook/MacBook Pro users are going to find its lack of connectivity a bit of an issue – I mean what’s the use of iMovie when there’s no freaking Firewire socket? Don’t know about you but none of my camcorders has super-fast wireless connectivity… And most other users are going to choke on the price tag, even if it does have far more storage than my eeePC and a much bigger display. But it’s the small footprint of the eeePC that makes it so appealing to me – I don’t care how thin it is, I just want to be able to rest it inconspicuously on my knee on the train.
We were in Toys R Us at the weekend (don’t ask…) and they had an eeePC on display there. It was the first I’d seen in the flesh and no photograph had prepared me how small and cute it was. I had to try hard not to drool.
Even Lucy, and she’s really not geeky at all, was impressed.
I read someone on the ‘net say the Macbook Air is the laptop Steve Jobs will use, but maybe no-one else.
“Apple are crazy for making a computer with no floppy drive, how will people install programs?”
Yes, ditdotdat, I know Apple are ahead of the game – usually. Firewire (which they seem to be dropping – my 1st gen brick iPod is still faster at file transfer than a modern iPod), introducing USB, dropping the floppy. I just think the MacBook Air is far too expensive and, as James says, you can’t help but think it’s a toy for Steve Jobs and no-one else.
Oh, and you can easily change the battery in an eeePC… unlike the MacBook Air which has an iPod-style internal battery.
The more I think about it, the more I think Apple have gone insanely insane. Obviously I just don’t get it – at any rate I just don’t want to rent movies from iTunes.
It’s also not that small (apparently). Of course it’s really very very very thin, but its footprint is about the same as my MacBook, so it still takes up the same amount of lap space.
Mmm, how often have I said ‘if only this laptop were thinner, dammit’?
You guys, you’re like Statler and Waldorf in the muppets!
:-)
Looks like if I should be worried about anything, it’s the Everex CloudBook and gOS… although the CloudBook deviates from my dream machine spec by having a hard drive. Very cute, though. gOS is a very cute Linux desktop too.
This made me laugh – comparison of the MacBook Air and the Portable Commodore 64 from 1983: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/20/tob_commodore_sx_64/