Comments on: MacBook Air and Target Markets

By: John Smith

John Smith — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 23:30:40 +0000

Good comment. It brought light to an old idea I had.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 20:50:59 +0000

yeah, I like JK’s blog. To rehash this topic, there are now TWO batteries issues. The first being the original fixed battery, which is flashing up as an issue now because of a potential false advertising issue about battery life. Specific to the battery life, I think 2 1/2 hours is pretty damn poor.

At any rate, this is why it is best to wait until the gen 2 for any new apple product to come out. I decided I can’t get an Air anyways because my EVDO card won’t work and I don’t want to get a USB version.

By: Oliver

Oliver — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 17:54:10 +0000

Looks like the battery life issue is getting a lot of attention now that the device is actually available:

http://jkontherun.blogs.com/jkontherun/2008/02/ars-tecnica–ma.html

By: paul

paul — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 18:24:00 +0000

yeah, i think a big part of the equation is what you want to do with this thing. If you are wanting a basic laptop that looks great and can do most things – you’ll probably like it. sure, there are drawbacks, and I would agree, I would wait for the next revision.

By: Oliver

Oliver — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 22:59:41 +0000

Jeff, I was only speaking from my perspective You were speaking about your requirements (VMs, …). Obviously your requirements are different than mine (and to be clear, I didn’t list them in order of priority… the higher screen resolution of my ThinkPad or the availability of a docking station is actually more important to me than the ability of carrying around a second battery). Not sure if your requirements are a better proxy for the broader market than mine. I guess Steve would probably say that they aren’t targeting me. I am sure the Air will sell a lot…

Anyway, I was hoping for something a bit more radically different. Leaving out the optical drive isn’t exactly revolutionary (my ThinkPad hasn’t got one either, it’s in the docking station) and I agree it’s a good decision.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 14:15:39 +0000

Oliver,
I am not denying that for a segment of the market the replaceable battery is not important, but the POV of my post was that for the target market Apple is targeting with the Air it’s not likely a factor.

To use the requirements of any one segment, in your case a power user, as a proxy for the broader market would be a mistake.

By: Tom Raftery

Tom Raftery — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 11:36:48 +0000

Jeff, I think you nailed it with the reference to the HD.

I have a 120gb drive on my MBP as well and there’s about 13gb available. No way I could manage with an just an 80gb.

As you say rev 2 of this will be a major improvement as only Steve can get away with!

Maybe then.

By: Alan Buxton

Alan Buxton — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 09:01:38 +0000

At my place of work in the UK we recently phased out optical drives for peoples’ (Wintel) laptops. They were very very rarely used. I’m very into less being more, and can’t help remembering another Apple product a while back that did not include (gasp) a floppy drive!

By: Oliver

Oliver — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 06:36:13 +0000

Well, I said “I would miss” the user-replaceable battery. Clearly, YMMV. I do have two batteries for my current laptop (and had two for my previous one as well). My current extended and regular battery packs give me about 7 hrs of runtime (primarily browsing/email via WiFi). I don’t carry both of them at all times, but certainly use them enough that I am thinking of adding another extended battery to compensate for the loss of capacity in the two original one-year-old batteries.

My Thinkpad has a Core (not 2) Duo 1.83 Ghz CPU and 2GB RAM, with integrated Intel video and is certainly fast enough for pretty much everything I have thrown at it (including running development tools and databases). It does have a 200 GB SATA drive, so plenty of space for VM images if I wanted to run any.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 04:52:30 +0000

The battery issue is a red herring. Most people don’t have a spare battery for their laptop, and if you can get a 5-6 hour charge, as you can on a Vaio TZ, then you really are hard pressed to convince me that a second battery capability is a necessity.

I don’t have a spare battery for my iphone either… and Apple sold 4 million of those.

Sam,
My MBP is a 2.3 with 2gb RAM and while I am inclined to agree with you on the processor speed, the fact remains that my old MBP was a 2mhz processor and it was kinda sluggish. More to the point, the Air has an Intel graphics chip that shares memory with the processor, while the MBP has an ATI or NVIDIA graphics chip with dedicated VRAM. Big difference.

Insofar as virtual machines are concerned, those things chew up a lot of hard disk space. I have 30gb free from my 120gb drive. I would be really reluctant to install on an 80gb 1.8″ drive (which are really slow to begin with). Also, the Air has an ATA drive while the MBP has a much faster SATA interface. Also, no Firewire on the Air.

I just wouldn’t have high expectations for the Air when it comes to processor or graphics intensive applications.