Our Editor and resident Mac user Philip Berne talks about why the Macbook Air may be his next laptop. Has he simply drunk the kool-aid, or is there a real machine in there?
Also read: Point / Counterpoint: Why I would not buy the Macbook Air
Here's why I will buy a Macbook Air this season: because I have stopped lying to myself about what I expect from my laptop. My current laptop, a 17-inch Powerbook, was a real desktop replacement, and I expected it to perform desktop tasks with the screen real estate to match. Since I bought it in 2003, I always expected I would replace it with a large laptop (I've been a laptop-exclusive user for 15 years), but then I started using a Dell Latitude D420 ultraportable at work, and I got used to a few things.
Living with an ultraportable
I got used to having much less storage on the laptop, and keeping my media files elsewhere. Only the essentials are on the machine, and I sideload files to and from my external drives when I want movies and music for traveling. I got used to toting my external DVD-R drive, because it usually doesn't matter when I forget it. I got used to using a separate monitor and keyboard, which will also work fine with a new Macbook Air.
Unfortunately, I also got used to having a built-in SD card slot, and I'm growing fond of my PC card HSUPA modem. But the Macbook Air doesn't mean I won't have 3G access or lots of available accessories, it just means that there will now be hubs and adapters to deal with. It's not a great way to travel, but it also means I can be more picky about what I take, and exclude some of the cords and add-ons I don't use on every trip.
But it's just so . . . dreamy
In exchange, I get all of the amazing benefits of the Macbook Air. As one of the first geeks in line when the Macworld exhibition doors opened, I can tell you that it is a striking machine. I've had hands on the Sony Vaio TX carbon fiber notebooks, and those machines were exceedingly thin at their tapered edge, but the Macbook Air is thinner all around, and has a design like it was formed from mercury, with few seams or sharp edges. So, I sacrifice a couple of pounds on the machine and have to carry around a USB hub?
But the small size isn't everything. The multi-touch trackpad, however, will be game changing. In five years, every laptop will have a multi-touch trackpad. I use my laptop for plenty of photo work, but nothing too strenuous, just average cropping and color work. The multi-touch trackpad, once fully implemented with Photoshop, will mean a much better experience.
I'm sorry, did you say Sixty-Four? That's ridiculous
I worry about the Macbook Air's performance, which is why I'll spring for an SSD. I know it means a serious hit to capacity, but I'll be backing things up with a terabyte drive, so I'll have space in the attic. I don't expect a great performance improvement from the SSD, but faster load times and boot times will be nice down the road, as apps and operating systems move beyond the system's capabilities. Also, in more than a half dozen laptops over the years, I've never had one whose hard disk drive didn't die before the 3-year warranty was up. I'm great about backing up, so it was never a fatal crash, but I would like something much more reliable, and SSD seems to be the way to go.
The Macbook Air isn't for everybody, but once I thought about what I honestly expected from my laptop, I realized it could definitely be for me. There are plenty of sacrifices, but to a large extent laptop owners have been making these sacrifices in some form or another for years, and not getting much in return in terms of size or style. I can live with the sacrifices, and I find the new technologies like the SSD option and the multi-touch trackpad to be enticing enough to want to buy one of these machines for myself.
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