MacBook Air

MacBook Air

So the rumors were right and Apple introduced a sub-notebook, kind-of. While most sub-notebook are basically designed to be usable in the airplane or the train. The MacBook air does not fit that bill, it is nearly as big as a regular 15 inch MacBook Pro, instead it is much thinner and light. Of course, in order to be so thin, compromises had to be made, no optical drive, no wired network, only one USB port, non-swappable battery. So what is the goal of that laptop? My hunch is that it is a meeting-book, when you go from meeting to meeting, having a lighter laptop with more battery to lug around makes your life easier. You don’t need a lot of network bandwidth, but a large screen and a DVI connection. In some sense, I suspect that this machine was designed with Steve Jobs needs in mind – he probably does not fly in economy class.

The interesting thing for me where the technologies introduced in this machine: a multi-touch sensitive track-pad, and a virtual optical drive. The first is present in many handheld devices, including the iPhone, the second is certainly no technical revolution, but it could be mental one, if PC’s firmares were able to boot off a CD-ROM on the network, maybe the optical drive will go the way of the floppy drive…

2 thoughts on “MacBook Air

  1. PCs are already able to boot from the network, with the PXE support. However, it is not a trivial thing to set up. PCs could also boot from usb keys.

  2. The trivial bit is the problem. What would be nice would be to have a standard program/service that lets remote machines PXE boot from a CD mounted locally.

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