qhoa1385

February 17, 2011 at 6:12pm

I somewhat agree with this, I mean ok, the Air is super thin and light, but and I can deal with the fact that it doesn't have an optical drive, but there will always be that "D'oh" time when you have a disc that need to be install/run and there's no external source available

and I mean sure, it's good to try to make portable computing even more portable but with limited connectivities and expansions, then isn't it more of a hassle to bring all the external stuff with the laptop?

Only if Cloud computing, and wifi connection become widely available in 2014, then maybe the Air will actually be useful, but until then, nope

livebriand

February 17, 2011 at 5:04pm

Hmm.. air: non-changable storage (SSD is integrated), few ports, not a ton of power, a bit high price for the power... no thanks. I'll go get a thinkpad x201, thicker but around the same price, slightly bigger screen (12.1" vs 11.6") and much better CPU (i series). I don't see the point in spending extra for it to be super thin.

Exarkun1138

February 17, 2011 at 3:31pm

No thanks. I used a Macbook Air, and quite frankly, I was very unimpressed. I'll take my Dell Latitude because I have tons of expansion ports, an optical drive, and it just "feels" right. The Macbook Air is a toy compared to it, and I hate having to do any kind of software install either wirelessly, or with an external optical drive. I hope he's completely off-base on his prediction.

DJSPIN80

February 17, 2011 at 12:43pm

I don't disagree with him.

ARM has an excellent RISC design, and they can do the whole performance/watt better than intel on so many levels.

First off, the RISC implementation of ARM is brilliant. Second, computing tasks are being sharded; if we can utilize OpenCL and GPGPU's for display related tasks (i.e., video conversion, H.264/WebM decoding, sound processing, and image/video processing), it can offload work from the CPU.

The Macbook Air is just the start of it all and I wouldn't be surprised if other vendors follow suit. What should follow suit are non-volatile memory for storage - SSD's either need to shape up or ship out, we need a larger capacity/$$$ than what SSD's offer.

madmcfred

February 17, 2011 at 10:46am

i love macs to a certain extent but the air is just a shinny wrapper. For the money you can get a lot nicer laptop for the same money. This niche of computers is just for the posh people really to show off at coffee shops.

MleB

February 17, 2011 at 9:51am

Maybe. But not.

 

Recently looking to upgrade my trusty EeePC 1015 netbook to a notebook with a little more horsepower, a newer Os and a marginally larger screen. Note please I intended to use this as I had my netbook - as both a mobile and home machine

As a reasonably OS-ambidextrous computer user, I looked at the 11" Air as an option. Lovely to look at and the flash drive gave at least the appearance of speed - but its two USB ports (or one, if you have the ethernet connector - sold separately - connected) - proved to be the final decider. Well, that and price.

For $500 less (and at approximately the weight of the larger Air), I got a 11" business-grade notebook running Win7 Pro, 3 USBs and an ethernet port, more storage and a 2 year warranty.

The footprint and weight of the Air may be what notebooks of the future look like, but if that means less connectivity (the assumption being you'll be doing everything wirelessly, regardless of location, I guess), then we've simply migrated to an iPad and given up on a 'real' mobile computer. 

LatiosXT

February 17, 2011 at 9:02am

Maybe more like the MacBook Pro, if one wants the performance trend of laptops to continue to rise at its current rate. If we go MacBook Air, then performance will stagnate until we come up with chips that have an exbortitant performance/watt value.