Apple MacBook Air: Encore please
The Apple MacBook Air has remained almost unchanged for a year and a half--a testament to the staying power of its design. So, how will Apple respond to the wave of inexpensive, ultra-thin lookalikes hitting the market over the next six months?
The Air is still a stunning design but its novelty and high price will come under assault as lookalikes flood the market
(Credit: Apple)The Air was a sensation when it debuted in January of 2008. Not that it sold by the boatloads, but the stunning form factor set off an industrial-design frenzy. Ergo, the Dell Adamo and the raft of "ultra-thin" laptops in the hopper as a result of Intel's push to get its "ULV" (ultra-low-voltage) chips in as many glamorous but affordable designs as possible.
The just-announced ultra-thin Acer Aspire Timeline is the writing on the wall. No, it's not the equivalent of a MacBook Air or Dell Adamo but it's close enough to give prospective buyers even more reason to balk at the $1,800-plus price tags attached to those two gorgeous designs.
And other designs are already out there like the 0.78 inch-thick MSI X340 X-Slim, which is, more or less, a photocopy of the Air. And even Lenovo is tempting fate with the 3.5-pound 13.3-inch IdeaPad U350, which will start at $649 and make the $1,900 ThinkPad X301--and the Air--look very expensive.
So, what does an Acer Aspire Timeline get you for $899? Let's take a quick look:
- Intel Core 2 Duo processor SU9400 (1.40GHz, 10 watts)
- 13.3-inch LED-backlit TFT LCD
- Mobile Intel GS45 Express chipset
- 4GB of DDR3 memory
- 6-cell lithium ion battery
- 500GB SATA hard drive
- 3.5 pounds
- Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit
Many of those specifications are a stone's throw away from the Air (and Adamo)--or match it.
So, what will Apple's MBA encore be? Thinner? Lighter? Faster? 3G capable? Dare I say, cheaper? Or a new industrial design that will send all the ultra-thin wannabes back to the drawing board? I'm waiting.
Brooke Crothers has served as an editor at large at CNET News, an editor at Dow Jones' Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, and a senior editor at InfoWorld. His CNET blog covers chip technology and computer systems, and how they define the computing experience. He also contributes to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. Follow Brooke on Twitter @mbrookec. 
"The Apple MacBook Air has remained almost unchanged for a year and a half--a testament to the staying power of its design."
If a Microsoft product had been unchanged for a year and half (or Sony, or Dell etc.) it would be an indication of their stagnation and how they can't innovate and are out of touch with the consumer.
It is pretty obvious that you aren't a hater but you also don't know what you are talking about either. Just because a design is constantly updated every six months or a year doesn't mean it is good or innovative. It is probably more telling that the company really doesn't know what they or their customers want. Apple puts a lot of time and $$ into creating premium designs that will last for more than a year. Usually 3-4 years.
My guess for what they will do with it is make it even more mobile by adding (optional) 3G wireless networking to the machine. Prices for SSDs will drop with market conditions (like they have every couple months with the Air). They really can start relying on Snow Leopard for performance improvements with the new GPU acceleration as well without major hits on power usage and higher processor clock speeds.
Besides all that, Macs are often avant-gard design wise and don't need to be refreshed. You could also argue that refreshing designs all the time creates a "old model/obselesence" in the minds of consumers, pushing them to upgrade sooner.
If HP had put out a newly designed laptop a year and a half ago this author would have said something along the lines that HP was stuck in the past or couldn't innovate or was resting on their laurels.
Basically it's different criteria for different companies depending on where your fanboy loyalties lie. If a person is an Apple fanboy they'll consider something the Apple does an asset but they'll consider that same asset a liability if it's done by a competitor company just because of who the company is.
DirectX is not required for gaming (far from it, in fact... most FPS games, even today, use OpenGL libraries for ease of cross-platform coding, the lack of confiscatory licensing fees from Microsoft, etc). The proof of this? Vista was the only platform you could get DX 10 for, yet the Windows gaming community clung to XP like it were a liferaft.
In the 3D/CG graphics world, OpenGL is still king, and doesn't look to be dethroned anytime soon.
Seriously? OpenGL is and has been as good as dead for gaming for a very long time. Sure, some vertical grpahics apps use it but DirectX is _THE_ API for gaming, period, and that's not changing any time soon. And for the record, DirectX 10 was one the primary reasons gamers moved to Vista when it first shipped, and those that stayed with XP were running games under DirectX 9, not OpenGL.
If you really want to learn more about the history of OpenGL and DirectX see http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/opengl-directx,2019.html.
OpenGL isn't dead. As Random_Walk said, it's used largely by gaming companies who do cross-platform development for their games, such as Blizzard and EA, as well as on consoles (no DirectX on Wii & PlayStations) and non-Windows mobile handhelds (Android, iPhone, etc.).
It's still very much alive and kicking, so long as there are gaming devices that don't run Windows -- which is a lot of them.
games are actually better under DirectX if you haven't noticed and the gaming community actually switched to Vista for DirectX 10 after some of the performance issues were worked out.
Play a game in DirectX mode then compare to the same game in OpenGL
big difference
Can you even name those FPS games? OpenGL may may still have it's niche market but you are seriously exaggerating it while trying to downplay the market saturation directX has. A typical fanboy move.
Oh, and dispite it's slow start, DX 10 is pretty much a standard for for many of the triple-A PC games coming out. If not DX 10, DX 9 is still viable. Either way, OpenGL is usually a non-player in the PC gaming arena. (I guess now you're going to try to downplay how big or important PC gaming is, right?)
Either way, and to get back on subject, few people consider Mac's to be a serious gaming platform. Which is what I think sythara was trying to allude to.
It is a waste of money, waste of time and doesn't even do _that_ much compared to things cheaper and just a teeny bit fatter.
What is a centimetre, compared to having less than a third of the functionality of most laptops?
Air was buckled in every way possible from day one, well, besides looks.
Regardless of how nice something is, i will never pay that much for it in one day. (nice being physical looks)
Has to be one of Apples worst points for me, and Dell too since they decided to release that terrible attempt...
It is a freak-child of laptops and netbooks. Ungodly big for a netbook, but terribly limited for a laptop. (hell, most NETBOOKS have more functionality than Air does! And that is sad...)
the first line of your comment states that so your not even relevant to apples market.
me, another story. i'm a total laptop geek/*****. i have my main big one; HP DV6700t w/bluray. my desktop for multimedia/server stuff. my msi wind for just surfing on the go and basic photos/scanning and planetarium/stellarium needs. and my macbook air for work (resume from standby is crazy w/the ssd. 1 sec, i swear. )
my main point about apple is that they priced it so crazy that it would only appeal to a person who wouldn't be using it as their main laptop. their target market is VERy specialized for it (ie is more of an accessory/second if not third laptop).
i hope they add an expresscard 54 slot or offer a pure matte black aluminum :)
just my .02
btw, here's a vid of startup, suspend, shutdown times of the air pre oct 2008 rev w/samsung 64gb ssd.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-G-DorsOhMA
No amount of brainwashing is going to override the fact that they install QuickTime and Safari _WITHOUT_PROMPTING_ and I would like to be part of a class-action lawsuit to _SUE_ apple for downloading software onto my PC without asking my permission first.
I will never use Apple-- never in my life - for anything whatsoever.
About a year ago Apple tried to package Safari w/ the new version of iTunes that came out and they quickly got slammed for it and they just as quickly made it optional during the install process.
If you're running iTunes you have to have QuickTime. Welcome to the proprietary world of Apple. Don't like it? Don't use iTunes. And you can always disable most of QuickTime's functionality as well as tell it during installation that you do NOT want it to be the default media player.
Anyway, to finish up, Apple does prompt you before installing either QuickTime or Safari. I'm no fan of Apple, but you sir just sound like an idiot who shouldn't be using a computer.
However, I agree that pushing Safari on people wasn't on. Still, I'm not sure you can honestly call installing Safari on your PC as "abuse".
Boy, I hope you don't have anything like a Firewire port on anything.... like a computer, scanner, hard drive or video camera. Wouldn't want you to support anything that Apple created.
Why do all the people think they are smart, by constantly asking Apple top make cheap, low quality garbage? If that is the wish, buy a PC, you got plenty of choices. I don't want garbage, I want hight quality, good design, good performance and reliability, intuitive, stable software, service and reliability to go with it and if the price is in relationship to the quality is acceptable, I pay it. Apple does all of this almost all the time. (Ask Rolls Royce to make a cheap car, why don't you?)
PC makers just fake it, they copy, they cheapen the product and that is a deception and a lye. No, the thin MSI x340 is not even close in quality to the MacBook Air, thank you, try it out first. See how the keyboard and the mouse works, keep it for 6-8 months and see how happy you will be, when you want to sell it and get no takers. A used MacBook Air still commands twice the price, the MSI X340 costs new.
and Windows 7 is coming out soon too
runs on netbooks just about as fast as XP
- by benjwah June 3, 2009 6:51 PM PDT
- "The Apple MacBook Air has remained almost unchanged for a year and a half--a testament to the staying power of its design."
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(33 Comments)More like a testament to Apples policy of updating its products once every thousand years.