More thoughts on the MacBook Air

Earlier today, in the bit regarding the MacBook Air announcement, I discussed briefly my immediate purchase of it, and I wanted to expound on that a bit more.

For me, the Air will be a secondary machine — a complement to a blazing-fast Mac Pro — and that, I think, is how it’s being positioned (if not explicitly); indeed, the dearth of ports almost demands the conclusion. I think I, like most people that have been waiting around for this thing (or some approximation of it) for as long as we can remember, would have preferred something smaller (please, everyone, stop conflating smaller with thinner), but this will do until that something comes along, if ever.

When it comes to notebooks, the one thing on which I refuse to budge is the keyboard (oh, right, it also has to run Mac OS X) — I want a full-size keyboard, and nothing less. The Air gives me that, albeit flanked by more metal than I wanted or anticipated.

Personally, I probably would have been completely satisfied with an all-specs-updated version of the 12 PowerBook (i.e., I’m totally willing to sacrifice screen real-estate for decreased width and depth), and if they came out with that a month from now I would probably dump the Air in a second. That said, in my case, the whole width debate is probably a pragmatic wash given the way I plan to use the Air.¹

Finally, and in light of my consumer electronics track record, I’m taking a lot of flak for not getting the SSD, but like I said before, I just can’t justify the additional $1000 for a subsidiary machine; were it my main machine, and I didn’t need more than 64GB, I would probably pony up for the next-gen storage. I’m curious to know why they aren’t offering a 32GB SSD; I really think that would have hit the sweet spot for a lot of people, including myself.

Notwithstanding everything I’ve just said, I’ve a good feeling that come two weeks from now, when this marvel of engineering is sitting in my lap and I’m typing away on it, I’m going to forget all about the fact that it’s a bit larger than the dream machine I’ve had in my head for the last couple of years, and will simply enjoy using it.

FOOTNOTES

I’ll likely never use it for anything more than browsing, replying to e-mail, and writing weblog posts, all of which will usually be done with the Air on my lap. I don’t plan to maintain photos/videos on it, much less use it to edit them, and seriously doubt I’ll ever do anything too processor-intensive with it. ↩