The new Macbook Air looks sweet as hell.

bleak · wizard life Joined: 31 Jul 2007

http://www.apple.com/macbookair/

Summarizing the guided tour:

It's incredibly thin, light and durable, with a full-size LED backlit keyboard and screen, and a larger trackpad with enhanced multitouch gestures such as zooming and back/forward navigation. It's got this apparently proprietary micro DVI video connector which also supports VGA, composite, and S-video. It's got a built-in iSight camera and microphone, and speakers I guess. Yay. Hardware specs include an Intel core 2 duo processor, 2 GB of RAM, and an 80GB HD, with an option for an additional 64GB of solid state hard drive sexiness. It has no optical drives but you can purchase a USB powered "Super Drive." You can also wirelessly access the optical drive on another mac or PC, which is pretty cool I guess.

I need to get myself a new laptop, and I want one of these.

edit: Price tag of $1800, pretty steep. ASUS eee runs you about $300-500. http://eeepc.asus.com/global/product.htm I'll probably buy myself one of those instead. :)

Broco · Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Headquarters

Yeah. It's thin all right. Well-specced and quiet too.

Not quite ideal though, considering what you're paying. The lack of optical drive has been widely noted, but there's also the matter that the battery is integrated, not good since batteries fail all the time. Also, the usual flaws of the MacBook -- mediocre keyboard and not enough USB ports -- are probably even worse on this. And I don't think thinness, aside from style points, is as important as lightness and smallness. Bottom line, I think this looks cool but there are too many kinks at this point for me to really consider buying it myself.

bruin · Joined: 09 Dec 2007 Location: Boston

If it had an optical drive and was say, $1000 less expensive I'd be much more interested in it. It is sexy though.
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Kappuru · forum bishonen Joined: 05 Dec 2006

108 · Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 3:08 am

am rich as shit; might buy one of these
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Toups · tyranically banal Joined: 03 Dec 2006 Location: Ebon Keep

man how do they even fit usb ports on that thing? is it mini usb?

still yeah. thats really, really sexy. but then, I have a fetish for small technology. this actually appeals to me as I rarely use my disc drive for anything. my laptop exists mostly for internettin'... I wouldn't mind having this for mobile computing and a nice pimped out desktop.

ah, if only I had monies :(
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Wilkes · Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 3:36 am

if someone handed me a fat paycheck I might buy that and use it

Wilhelm scream* · Joined: 11 Sep 2007 Location: Ajax, Ontario, Canada

Panoptic · Joined: 05 Dec 2006

3 grand for the SSD-equipped model. Yeesh. Either way, I'm not sure I could live with a single USB port and no optical drive (I'm not going to carry the add-on drive around; that defeats the purpose of not integrating it).

Anyway, if I were in the market, I'd have one of these; I think I'd wait for the Penryn-core processors though. Either that, or a Thinkpad.

Mikey · Joined: 11 Dec 2006 Location: endless backlog

Did any of your teachers in elementary school ever make you stand folders up on end to block others' view of your paper while you were taking tests? Essentially, constructing a folder fort on your desk?

Upon seeing that, my first thought was that two of them would make a pretty good folder fort.

Takashi · Joined: 04 Dec 2006

theone · Joined: 15 Jan 2008

geez that is thin it must be super light too, ill take it

Felix · Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 7:02 pm

i'm honestly really impressed at their leaving out an optical drive. it.. severely limits data backup or recovery options, obviously, but optical media is definitely starting to lag behind in terms of form factor, and this is a pretty progressive move.

Wilhelm scream* · Joined: 11 Sep 2007 Location: Ajax, Ontario, Canada

shnozlak · Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 8:34 pm

Felix · Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 8:44 pm

basically, NO MOVING PARTS is a miraculous step forward, and needed to happen for fully-featured PCs; too bad that it had to be apple's step forward (as so many are), because those aren't cheap. it remains to be seen whether a truly 'open platform' (that you have access to the hardware of) is at all compatible with the super great form factor.

shnozlak · Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 9:38 pm

Ive been out shopping for SSDs (SOLID STATE DRIVE). Man I cant wait for the price to drop. Super low seek time, 65mb/sec, almost no heat, uses .9 watts while in use vs a HD which uses around 1.9 watts in use or not. Size is also limited but it would be great for what I do with my laptop.

Setting these up in a RAID 0 type config would be killer.
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slipstream · hates LOTR films Joined: 05 Dec 2006

It's hard not to be impressed with what Apple is designing. I haven't done any research into the matter, but is there a way to run OSX but still run Windows programs or is it always going to be a matter of waiting for someone to port things over?
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Broco · Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Headquarters

Felix · Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 10:57 pm

speaking of which, i wonder if parallels is ever going to implement directdraw support. i know that legacy windows features certainly aren't anywhere near high on their priority list, but at least most directdraw games wouldn't have performance issues in any sort of 'wrapper.'

Panoptic · Joined: 05 Dec 2006

I recall hearing somewhere that there was an app being developed that could use the .dll's from Windows and run Windows apps natively inside of OS X without any virtualization/emulation. That'd get me seriously thinking about switching, right there, especially if you could get SetPoint to override the OS X mouse controls.

Internetics · Joined: 19 Jul 2007

I'm thinking of getting a Mac mini!

That's about all I can contribute to this Apple wanking. So it's a light, laptop with a 13" screen? Great. The keyboard lighting-up when it was dark is cool. But, really. The damn things intended for the ultrahip Mac business man or LADY that would love to stow this in her purse and fill her laptop case with makeup accessories.

Think about it, people! It makes too much sense!!
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Takashi · Joined: 04 Dec 2006

Hey look, it's small!
And it lights up!
And it's so modern, stylish and what everybody obviously wants.

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bleak · wizard life Joined: 31 Jul 2007

Toptube · Anti-cabbage Party Candidate Joined: 23 Apr 2007

I think this sums things up nicely. also the panasonic that they link in that article, I used one two years ago. they are fucking radical.

i'm also about to make a post on my oppinions of physical media versus digital delivery.

slipstream · hates LOTR films Joined: 05 Dec 2006

!= · Joined: 04 Dec 2006 Location: the planet of leather moomins

I have a g4 cube sitting right here. I did not buy it new.

DonMarco · graphics fucker Joined: 06 Dec 2006

Between this and Sony's ultrathin (3mm) 11" OLED display for $2500, I'd have to wonder how rich these people think I am. Whats wrong with a 8-pound Laptop and a 19" LED display, both of which combined are $500?
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!= · Joined: 04 Dec 2006 Location: the planet of leather moomins

The fact that you might be living in a modern city with a public transport system and thus a certain amount of time passing in the upright position?

The fact that you might want to feel comfortable while doing so?

The fact you might not want to dedicate all your carry-on capacity to such a device?

Talbain · Joined: 14 Jan 2007

I'm gonna say the Asus EEE PC is still far more viable, as are many of the computers offered by Fujitsu, considering the price of the "Air" is ridiculous. Not that it's going to stop Mac freaks from buying it, mind you.
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shnozlak · Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 9:30 pm

fun facts

IT HAS NO DOCK
1 usb port so youd need a splitter if you want to plug it into a desktop keyboard and mouse once you get it home

the battery is BUILT IN
so no batt swaps
and if your cells go belly up you get to pay for the privilege of sending it in.

still only a 1 button mouse.

Just buy an ultra mobile if your really hurting for space.
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108 · Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 3:24 am

CubaLibre · the road lawyer Joined: 02 Mar 2007 Location: Balmer

Broco · Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Headquarters

At this point they are only staying with the 1-button design because it's a part of their brand and they are afraid of a New Coke-type outcry.

I think it's really clever what they did on desktops with the Mighty Mouse: they entirely avoided the press harping they "gave in" to multiple buttons by making this weird-ass mouse that still looks like it has only one button and with extra features that let them pretend they are leaping ahead instead of catching up. Truly they're the kings of PR. Seems they haven't found an equivalent trick for laptops, though (aside from the annoying crap Tim mentioned).

Talbain · Joined: 14 Jan 2007

108 · Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 8:26 am

psiga · saudade Joined: 04 Dec 2006

CubaLibre · the road lawyer Joined: 02 Mar 2007 Location: Balmer

shnozlak · Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 7:13 pm

So your saying I have to lift my finger to left click? Jesus.
What about middle clicking?

Also as a gamer WHY do you prefer Vista? Dose it launch you games "better" or something? The only promise Vista had was winFS and that got canned.
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CubaLibre · the road lawyer Joined: 02 Mar 2007 Location: Balmer

It looks pretty, networking is easier, driver nonsense is easier, it isn't a substantial enough resource hog to slow performance (at least with 2GB RAM, par for the course on a midrange gaming PC these days).

Though more what I mean is that it isn't worse than XP in any way (and in a few ways it is a little better), and in a couple years it'll be the standard, so you may as well go ahead and use it.
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Broco · Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Headquarters

I've heard repeatedly on techie forums that Vista suffers from many glitches across the board. E.g. a university store tech was saying that 80% of the laptops he was receiving for repair ran Vista and he saw all sorts of weird inexplicable shit. I've also heard that Microsoft employees don't want to use it on their home machines. And MS has issued patches for bugs that really should never have been there in the first place, like file copying was like 5x slower than it should be. All these rumors add up in my mind. Its general programming quality just seems to be low. If you didn't get this impression, it's probably just luck in your hardware and applications that avoided trouble.

I've used it briefly and I agree there are a lot of nice touches -- the least ugly default GUI theme yet, shorter system directory names, well-designed menus. But stability is much more important than this minor stuff.

Because of the bugginess and because there are no genuine killer features, I'm not convinced Vista will ever be the standard. Unless the service packs really fix things up properly, it may be skipped over for the next version of Windows by most users, like Windows ME.