When you buy any piece of technology you have to expect that you will be using something that suddenly becomes obsolete. Not because the electronics don’t work any more; simply that the next stage of development has taken place as we progress – although that’s arguable, I suppose. At my daughter’s age (13), the peer pressure to
upgrade is quite incredible and I occasionally have stopped to think how grateful I am that we are not in an iPhone service area…
I am less likely to take such things so seriously, and when we bought the MacBook Pro I am using right now, in November 2007, I was aware that there were rumors of a replacement in the works. But, probably like the early iPhone adopters, I would be a little irked if Jobs had done a memory-doubling, price-halving thing on me. Maybe a little more than irked, actually.
Well,
MacWorld 2008 has come and gone and there was no new MacBook Pro.
What there was is the new
MacBook Air... which looks to be on average about as thin as my little finger and is 0.16 inches at its thinnest point. It looks like a bit of a toy which, at close to $2000 ($1799, or over $2000 if you buy the extended warranty, AppleCare), would be an expensive one. But it has redeeming features – excluding the 13.5-inch backlit LED displays, which my tired old eyes would not appreciate – such as a solid-state drive and a touch screen.
The size of the drive has been reported as both 64 kbyte and 80 kbyte. In fact, the 1.6 GHz version comes with an 80 kbyte high-speed, but conventional, hard drive. The 1.8 GHz version (you’re really going to see that speed increase in Excel…) is an upgrade that comes with the 64 Gbyte solid-state drive. It is probably the Samsung 1.8-inch drive
announced in 2007 and now shipping in volume. That’s not going to be the end of development, as companies like Toshiba have been talking about drives, short-term, up to 128 Gbyte between 1.8 inches and 2.5 inches. Considering that the hard drive is by far the weakest link of the modern computer, this move is about time.
But that
giant increase in speed and the swap out to a lower capacity drive come at a price. Dealing with Apple gets you familiar with silly upgrade prices (a couple of hundred dollars for 4 Gbyte of memory comes to mind) but this price jump is spectacular: the 1.8 GHz version retails at $3098!
The MacBook Air has no CD drive – the case is probably too thin – and you have to connect to a external one if you want, you know, to load some software or something. Add $99 for an Air SuperDrive. That uses the sole USB 2.0 port. Of course, if you want to connect to a network using a cable, rather than Wi-Fi, add another $29 for an Ethernet Adaptor; that can then join the fight over the USB port with the CD drive…
So will all these changes play out in the next MacBook Pro as well? And when?
The solid-state drive would be a delightful change, but most users would beg for more than 64 Gbyte. So, maybe two drives? One for the operating system and applications and one for data? That would be good.
Single USB port? Don’t think that would fly: I already have a hub on my desk. The new tracking system (which I haven’t seen but which has been likened to the iPhone/iTouch panel) would probably be liked by most
cool users, but I’m uncool, so it would probably just annoy me.
And the one thing I absolutely want on my next MacBook Pro (not for a couple of years) is missing on the MacBook Air: a battery compartment! This is yet another Apple product where the battery is locked away from the consumer. I’m sure the brave among us would not hesitate to take a screwdriver and just forge ahead taking the bottom cover off. Until you have done that, of course, you don’t know what kind of replacement battery you need – if it is even available on the open market and not a special for Apple. You can send your machine home to them, Apple says, and they will
replace the battery in 5 working days for $129. If you live in Canada you’ll need to fork out CA$159 – an exchange rate of US$1 = CA$1.23, which hasn’t existed for the last two years.
But, now, I have a new Apple problem. I’m spending my working days with my iSight camera looking at me. How do I know it’s turned off? How do I know the microphone, hidden in one of the loudspeaker compartments, isn’t turned on? Who is watching me and listening to me? Am I getting paranoid???
Damn you, Jobs!
