The Skinny on MacBook Air
Apple’s new MacBook Air doesn’t take your breath away, like the original one did back in January 2008 when Steve Jobs yanked it from a Manila envelope. In the age of iPad, slender laptops are blasé. What Apple did do, with this relaunch, is turn a niche style statement into a mass-friendly option. It’s MacBook Air, minus the early-adopter tax.
When my wife saw the new Air, she said, “It’s like they just fixed everything wrong with it.” Her trusty original model has already been decapitated once, owing to a weak hinge that just gave out at some point (and then repaired). Its hard disk drive has been problematic since Day 1, and she regularly runs the battery down in the course of the day.
By contrast, this new Air has a sturdier hinge — the whole body is, in fact, altogether sturdier. Instead of the hard drive, every single MBA model now has hard-wired solid-state memory. The battery can run 7 hours on a charge. Even the price has been fixed, in a sense: Until last week, the MacBook Air line started at $1500. Now the base is $1000.
That’s not the whole truth, of course. There are two models, one with an 11.6-inch screen, a slower processor and a 5-hour battery life. That’s what costs $1000. The better option, the one I reviewed, has the 13.3-inch screen like its predecessor, and has the longer battery life. It starts at $1300, higher but still $200 less than the previous low-end Air. Though both have two USB ports (that’s right, a 100% USB increase!), only the 13-incher has an SD card slot. Anyone with a digital camera and a knack for losing cords knows the value of that.
Most virginal computers are refreshingly responsive, but this thing absolutely springs to life. Open the lid from sleep, and in a blink, your screen is ready. A full boot takes 15 seconds — by contrast my very powerful MacBook Pro gets to the login screen in about a minute and a half. While the difference is, in part, due to everything I’ve got jammed into the Pro’s hard drive, the MBA’s solid-state drive does help make my hot rod feel like an old mule.
Some people joked that with the 11-inch MBA, Apple has finally built a netbook — a lightweight, low-powered machine that rivals the Asus Eee PC and its ilk. Joking aside, though, I think Apple is trying to reach that audience. For some people hunting for a simple net-friendly machine, maybe an iPad will suffice. But for others, who want to replace a clunker of a laptop with something sufficiently capable but easier to tote around, the Air is the option.
I said that the Air is mass-friendly, but I didn’t say it was cheap. Apple makes a lot of money (about $28 million every day, last I checked) selling people good hardware at high prices. (The only Apple product I’m certain isn’t overpriced is the iPad, though people whine that it is.) So Apple doesn’t sell a $300 netbook, but now it does sell a $1000 alternative to one. If that doesn’t make sense, you’re just not in their crosshairs.
I deliberately distance the Air from the iPad because they don’t promise the same experiences. There’s no touchscreen here, no App Store goodies. Even with the promise of a new Mac OS with iPad-like traits coming next year, there’s really no overlap in the foreseeable future. This is a laptop, just like any other. It will even run Windows, if you can figure out how to install it without using a disc. (There are ways!)
But while Apple probably won’t “cannibalize” iPad sales with a slightly more affordable MacBook Air, it may begin to gnaw at the poor, sensible white MacBook. It’s a hard set of tradeoffs: At the same price, the MacBook has larger screen, a faster chip, a lot more internal storage and a 10-freakin’-hour battery life. But it is chunky and weighs 4.7 lbs. — more than twice the weight of the same-priced Air.
If you’re not a filmmaker or music producer, that extra horsepower won’t be missed. If you don’t amass MP3s or movies by the thousands, the storage isn’t a big deal. If you commute, those pounds off do mean a lot. And many people are satisfied with 10-inch screens, let alone 11.6-inch ones.
I’ve never regretted buying my wife’s MacBook Air, but I sure wish there had been a $1000 option back when we paid $1500 for it, refurbished. Then again, I probably still would have opted for this $1300 configuration. The bigger screen — not to mention the longer battery life and that durned SD card slot — are well worth the upsell.
Catch up with Wilson on Twitter at @wjrothman.
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