Still As Life

You have no doubt heard by now that Apple unveiled the brand new Macbook Air at the Macworld Expo this week. Given my recent purchase of a Macbook Pro, I have been very interested to see how these compare. After all, the Air is meant to be only 1.9cm at it's thickest point and 0.4cm at it's thinnest. Now my Macbook Pro is about 2.4cm evenly across the whole laptop. So this isn't logically that much bigger than the Air.

I just saw this video with a comparison of the two at the Apple booth and all I can say is wow. I think I would break it if I owned a laptop as small as this:



On the other hand though, I want one purely for the awesome factor.

There are of course a few downsides and at this stage it would not replace the current Macbook lines as it is a different market again.

The Macbook Air does not have a firewire port, or a wired Ethernet connection. It also only has a single USB port. A USB to Ethernet dongle is available, but then there goes your singular USB port. So no doubt a USB hub will be a required accessory for one of these, unless you are in a truly wireless environment, which I suppose, I kind of am. I use wireless on my laptop at uni, at home and at my parents place, and those are pretty much the only places I use it. For anywhere else, I have my 3G modem, which would take up the USB port. So I suppose, it would not be that big of a deal really.

It comes standard with a 1.6ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 2gb of RAM and an optional upgrade to a 1.8ghz CPU. As for storage, it comes standard with and 80gb hard drive, the same as the ones used in iPods. The hard drive has an optional upgrade as well to a faster 64gb solid state drive.

So power and storage wise, it is pretty decent. Of course it doesn't compare to the Macbook Pro's which are still the workhorse model laptops.

The things that are, in my opinion, the biggest downfalls for it are the lack of a dedicated graphics card. It uses an Intel integrated GMA X3100 graphics processor which shares 144mb of RAM with the main system memory, and it does not have a built in optical drive.

For many people the integrated graphics card may not be a big deal, but for me, it is.

Apple have provided a solution the the lack of an optical drive with the external Macbook Air SuperDrive. Again, this is connected via USB to the single USB port. The external drive is something you can buy additionally, it does not come with the laptop.

I can understand that the market this laptop is aimed at may not necessarily have such a big need for an optical drive, and ultra-portability is more the key factor in the development of this laptop, but once you add all the things you need to carry around with you, if you need them, a Macbook or Macbook Pro may still be a better option. After all, they are still quite small.

The negatives aside, watch the video and be amazed at the new Macbook Air. Not only at the size of it, but the new functions of the touch pad.

The Macbook Pro (and I assume also the standard Macbook) has a very innovative touch pad system that includes extremely useful functionality such as, tapping with two fingers is a right click, touching it with two fingers and moving them the direction you want to go is scrolling etc.The Macbook Air builds on this with even more functionality such as zooming. Whether all of the functionality is available in all applications, or just in things like iPhoto remains to be seen (by me anyway), but it's just another step along the development path anyway.

Now if only my Macbook Pro could lose some weight and gain some cool aerodynamics such as the Air, but whilst keeping its higher powered components, that would be awesome.

Labels: hardware, technology, video clips