Life is grand

I wanted to dash this off so that when I wake up tomorrow and see a MacBook Air I am reminded why I shouldn’t get one.

It is arguably the finest looking laptop ever made. Twiggy is jealous of the 0.16″ waist, the 0.76″ chest. Weight watchers should award it a Lifetime Fat Fighter Achievement award. It fits in a manilla envelope and apparently gets 5 hours of battery life. Splash out for the solid state hard-drive and shrines will be setup in honour by your local geeks. Legend has it can glide across the room if thrown by an Olympian frisbee athlete. Mortals can settle for a well placed couch toss. Within such a divine mould lies a truly useful machine. Powerful processor, decent hard-drive, usable graphics-card, wireless mojo, the right connections, a lovely screen and the capability of running every application I need on a daily basis, from the terminal to Photoshop.

Yet I should not buy it.

You see I already have the MacBook Air’s dowdy but workable sister, the MacBook Pro. She is a bit thicker at 1″ but hardly portly. The 15″ screen makes for a wider and deeper body but the prettier sister is actually slight larger in area than the cute and fun sister, the MacBook. Thin matters but I’m still going to have to jam lovely Air into the driver’s seat pocket on the way home. I can’t slide her into the cubby or door pockets. Nor will she make much difference on a plane or train, elbows will be bashed.

The Air is the sister I should have bought a year ago, only she was still seeing Steve at that point and just wasn’t available. As it is I picked the MacBook Pro and life has been, and still is, good. Would the Air make me happier? Sure, but I’m a committed guy and can’t afford to be switching willy nilly at every flash of shiny.

The problem is the Air is just too similar to the MacBook and MacBook Pro. Sounds daft but usage wise it will get the same treatment. It would be my desktop replacement, the laptop I took to meetings and brought home. I’d poke photos in Photoshop on it, code websites and surf the web. There is nothing I can do with the Air that I cannot do with the MacBook Pro. Except invoke wobbly legs in nearby geeks.

If Apple had released an Asus Eee sized laptop today I would be several hundred Euros poorer already. That is the Apple laptop I wanted and which would complement and not replace my MacBook Pro. The usage would be different and would justify the purchase. It would be the scrappy pal next to my gorgeous mistress.

I’ll end by saying that the MacBook Air is going to fly out of the shop. The poor MacBook has little chance except with the most pragmatic purchaser (all one of you.) At €1699 it is going to easily sway many MacBook buyers looking at a €1200 bill. If I were in the market for a MacBook or MacBook Pro I’d be thinking hard about the MacBook Air. The light weight and the slim for factor will do more for you than a few more imps in the processor.

As it is, I’m thinking hard about the Asus Eee instead; €400, fits in a jacket pocket and does everything but Photoshop. A shame it looks like the hired help.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 12:17 am and is filed under Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.