Speeds and Feeds

As usual, there were many specific rumors about what Steve Jobs would be announcing at MacWorld Expo this week. Several were reasonably credible, but Apple runs a tight ship; there's really no way to be sure what will come out at any given show.

The MacBook Air is remarkably thin and stylish, but it isn't for everyone.

(Credit: Courtesy of Apple)

At the beginning of the year, based on the better rumors and some discounting of existing Mac products, I was pretty sure we'd see four things: new Mac Pro workstations, a refresh of the MacBook Pro line with Blu-ray optical drives and Intel 45nm processors, minor improvements for the iPhone, and a new subnotebook.

New Mac Pro configurations were announced a week before the show-- minor updates, but significant for the professional audience. We got the new subnotebook, the MacBook Air, this week. The iPhone and iPod got only some software tweaks. There was nothing new for the MacBook Pro family.

But that's okay. I'll keep waiting for a better iPhone, and I'm still sure there'll be Blu-ray equipped MacBook Pro models before long.

In the meantime, the MacBook Air is worth a closer look.

The first thing to understand about this machine is that it's aimed at a relatively small market. Apple made a series of design decisions that limit the audience for the Air, but for those potential buyers who aren't turned off by these choices, the Air is the best machine on the market.

If you're not part of the target audience, though, the Air might look like a poor choice. To quote a friend of mine, Mac book author Brian Tiemann, "Is it just me, or is this a ridiculously overpriced, feature-poor, and generally useless pig of an idea?" Honestly, I can see where he's coming from. I think he just doesn't see where the Air is coming from.

Let's list the obvious objections:

• Non-expandable RAM.
• Small hard disk.
• No optical drive.
• Non-removable battery.
• Peripheral interfaces limited to one USB port and one monitor output.
• High price for the included features ($1,799 and up).

Start with 100 million potential buyers and go down the list. Most will get past the first two points, but the lack of an internal optical drive will turn away a lot of people. The fixed battery is a big problem for a lot of people, and still more folks won't accept the limited I/O options. If you care about any of these things, the Air doesn't look like a good value for money. By the time you reach the end of the list, only a few people will still be paying attention.

But once they look at the Air, those remaining candidates may be quickly won over. It's so thin! The case is so cleverly curvy that it's actually deceptive. Visually it looks thinner than a fashion magazine, but in fact it's three-quarters as thick as a regular MacBook Pro, at least at the back edge. At the front edge it's thinner, but it doesn't taper smoothly down to 0.16" (4mm) as Jobs claimed in his speech. That edge actually hangs in air almost half an inch off the desk. (I didn't bring one of my digital calipers to the Expo, but I do intend to measure a real machine when I get the chance.)

It's too thin for a removable battery; the Air's battery is a lithium-polymer pack just a few millimeters thick spread across the full width of the machine under the palm rests and trackpad. (If you need longer battery life, you'll need an external battery such as the PPS-118 Portable Power Station from Battery Geek. There aren't many other options for MacBooks because of Apple's proprietary MagSafe magnetic power connector.)

The Air is also too thin for a conventional motherboard with sockets for the processor, memory, network interface, and other configurable options. The Air's processor, chipset, and memory are all soldered down on a board about three by six inches that sits to one side below the keyboard. The 80GB hard disk or optional solid-state disk ($999 extra for 16GB less space!) sits beside it. And that's all that's down there; that's all there's room for.

Apple says the Air is the thinnest laptop on the market, and I think that's true. I checked the websites for some notably thin notebooks including the Toshiba Portégé R500, the Sharp Actius MM20, and the Sony VGN-X505; all are thicker. (But most are lighter, and the R500 has an internal optical drive, so I'd have to say Toshiba deserves similar praise for the sophistication of its mechanical engineering.)

Also, the Air is faster than any physically comparable ultraportable, and probably offers better battery life when comparing the standard batteries. It doesn't have the performance of a full-size notebook, but at 1.6 GHz or (for $300 more) 1.8 GHz, it's plenty fast enough for Mac OS X or (if you prefer) Windows Vista.

And while you would inevitably run into bandwidth limitations, that one USB port can be connected through a hub to multiple devices-- flash drives, external hard disks, external Ethernet adapters, even additional external displays using the DisplayLink standard.

There are a lot of small notebooks on the market that sell pretty well. Dell's Latitude D430, for example, is the same weight as the Air, has the same display resolution (on a slightly smaller screen), has all the usual I/O ports and expandability, and it's a good bit cheaper. It's a decent-looking machine, but it makes no sacrifices to style.

By comparison, the MacBook Air looks like it's from a different planet, a more advanced civilization. It's like that because it's missing all of the functionality that forces the Dell machine to look relatively clunky-- all the connectors, buttons, and lights that make it more usable, all the latches and screws that make it expandable. The Air has almost none of that stuff, but while that makes it irrelevant to most people, the Air's clean, thin lines make it uniquely attractive for others.

If I was a Hollywood studio executive, a New York art-gallery owner, or an editor of one of those fashion magazines, there's just no other computer I'd want to use. I'm not any of these things, of course; very few people are. But do understand: there are people who are exceptionally style-conscious for personal and professional reasons, and the MacBook Air was designed for these people.

There are also people who wouldn't use an internal optical drive or an Ethernet cable or an Option GT Max 3.6 Express HSDPA wireless WAN adapter anyway. For these people, simplicity is a positive advantage. The Air is a complete computer; it just isn't designed to be the center of a complex computer system.

If all you need is a display, a keyboard, and a WiFi interface, and you don't mind paying a slight premium for high style, maybe the MacBook Air is for you, too.

I enjoy reading the personal blogs of Scott Adams (the creator of Dilbert) and John Dvorak (PC Magazine columnist and host of Cranky Geeks), but I don't expect to learn anything there. The entertainment is value enough.

Today, however, I was surprised to see these two gentlemen linking to the same story on Next Energy News covering Toshiba's announcement of a "200 kilowatt" nuclear reactor only "20 feet by 6 feet" in size. Such a reactor could be installed in a garage-sized building and shared among the houses on just one residential block, the apartments in one large building, or a single good-size corporation headquarters. With maintenance-free operation and the price of the generated energy estimated at 5 cents per kilowatt-hour, this announcement appeared to undermine the usual arguments against nuclear power.

Run through the basic numbers, as one commenter on Dvorak's blog did, and you come out with annual operating costs around $87,500 and a total cost over 40 years of about $3.5 million. Heck, never mind powering the neighborhood; I know a lot of people in Silicon Valley who'd build one into their houses.

Alas, the rest of the important numbers--the ones not covered by Next Energy News--don't work out so well for the Valley's wealthy. According to some information I found on the Encyclopedia of Earth, the reactor in question is called the Rapid-L, and the 200-kilowatt electrical output is just a small part of the reactor's thermal power production of 5 megawatts.

So even if your McMansion is filled with enough electronic gizmos to use up that 200-kilowatt power rating, there's no way it can dissipate 5 megawatts of thermal power. That's enough to heat over 200 homes during a 27° F (-3° C) cold snap. You'll just have to share.

But if you're one of the Silicon Valley multimillionaires who built mansions in Idaho because you love fly-fishing, you may be in luck; just divert part of your trout stream to provide cooling water for the reactor. You'll never need to turn off that big plasma TV again, and even the fish will be happier in the warmer water.

Wednesday morning I visited the new Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters of Zonbu, makers of the low-cost, service-supported Linux computer I mentioned last month (here). I met with Zonbu CEO Grégoire Gentil, who gave me an overview of the company's business plan and a demo of the system. He also offered ... Read more

A big fuel cell from UTC Power was in the news here in Silicon Valley this week when Fujitsu installed it as a backup power source for its local campus. CNET's Michael Kanellos wrote a good story about the event here, and took pictures ("Photos: Fujitsu unveils king-size fuel cell").

Although the fuel cell itself runs on hydrogen, there's no convenient source of pure hydrogen in Silicon Valley, so UTC Power also provided a steam methane reformer that yields hydrogen from natural gas.

One place where pure hydrogen is readily available is NASA's Cape Canaveral facility, and BMW recently completed an eight-week test of its Hydrogen 7 prototype vehicle there. (See the Edmunds review of the car, and a story of the test, with a great photo of the car posed in front of the Endeavour before the recent launch.)

BMW has now handed the keys to one of these cars to actor Will Ferrell (BMW press release), though I suspect BMW will learn less from Ferrell than it did from the NASA testers.

Interestingly, however, the Hydrogen 7 is not a fuel cell car, in spite of stories like this one. BMW just uses its big 6-liter V12 engine with minor modifications allowing it to run on hydrogen as well as gasoline. This is may be the most practical way to run a car on hydrogen, but it's not the wave of the future.

Ford has made a true fuel-cell car, the Fusion 999, and it's considerably faster than the Hydrogen 7. In fact, Ford's unique vehicle, derived from its production Fusion sedan, recently set a speed record for fuel-cell vehicles, reaching 207.297 mph on the Bonneville salt flats. This isn't a car you'll be seeing on the road anytime soon; it has a 770-horsepower electric motor and several huge pressure tanks, it weighs 6,700 pounds, and its range is only just good enough for the high-speed runs on the salt. Richard S. Chang blogged about the event for The New York Times and there's also an interesting video on the Popular Mechanics site.

Ford worked with Ohio State University on the Fusion 999 and on OSU's scratch-built Buckeye Bullet 2, a fuel-cell streamliner that may be able to exceed 350 mph. There's a blog for that project, and it's fascinating reading if you like cars and high technology.

But when can we regular folks have fuel cells of our own? Other than expensive and clumsy solutions like the Trulite and Medis products I blogged about last month (somewhat disparagingly), it won't be soon.

EE Times recently reported that Toshiba, for example, expects it will take several years to bring practical fuel cells to market. "Practical," in this case, means fuel cells based on DMFC (direct methanol fuel cell) technology, which can be powered by inexpensive methanol (also known as wood alcohol).

Samsung has demonstrated a version of its Q35 ultraportable notebook running on a DMFC power supply, achieving 240 hours of operation over the course of a month, but don't get too excited-- the supply is fairly bulky (see some photos and a video on AVING.net) and I'm not entirely convinced that the full month's worth of fuel is stored internally.

It's no coincidence that Samsung chose the Q35 for the demonstration; even the best DMFC fuel cells have much lower power density (watts of output power per cubic inch) than lithium batteries, so they'll have to be very large to support high-performance notebooks.

I'm sure DMFC technology will reach the consumer market soon enough, and then we'll see how it compares with batteries. I suspect lithium batteries will remain the most popular solution for laptops, and I'm sure handheld electronics will stick with batteries unless there's some breakthrough in fuel cells. But it'll be good to have another choice in portable power supplies.