MacBook Air – Novelty or breakthrough

It’s pretty easy to be underwhelmed by sales pitches, and the MacBook Air has a pretty gushy sales pitch. On the other hand, the people doing the gushing are the designers. MacBook Air, in all fairness, is a pretty elegant piece of design with a lot of functionality. If you’re a computer support person, the MacBook Air design will give you quite a few things to think about.

MacBook Air has a flash memory, and averages between five and seven hours of battery time, depending on whether you buy the 11 of the 13 inch model. For a notebook, it really does have quite a bit of grunt and a multi-touch track pad.

It’s extremely portable, lightweight and definitely not clunky. If you’re looking for a go-anywhere notebook, this is probably it, and it doesn’t have the typical weaknesses of ordinary notebooks, which can be too basic. MacBook Air comes with a duo core, meaning the processing is actually pretty good with processor specifications above that of a typical notebook. (The standard Intel Core 2 Duo works very well on a desktop PC, let alone a notebook.)

Apple included a full-sized keypad with MacBook Air, a very good move in design terms in getting the design concept outside the “overgrown iPod” context. There’s also the standard built-in Apple camera, with decent picture quality even on those relatively small screens.

The Apple designers when talking about MacBook Air made the point that as a result of designing so many different products, particularly portable products like iPods and iPhones, they had a pretty good knowledge base when designing MacBook Air. Computer designers as a species could reasonably be classified as “obsessive compulsive”, but it’s reasonable to say in this case it MacBook Air really is some sort of design benchmark.

MacBook Air in the market and on the job

Let’s face it, laptops and notebooks reached a sort of plateau a few years back. Laptops remained expensive and clunky and notebooks remained inadequate in many ways. MacBook Air isn’t particularly cheap, but in terms of relative value and presentation compared to laptops, it’s pretty competitive. This is the sort of working machine if you take with you anywhere without getting a hernia and without constant worry about its survivability with impacts.

Aluminium housing is actually quite a good all-purpose method of enclosing sensitive equipment, and while the MacBook Air is unlikely to replace the Frisbee, there’s no need to have a heart attack any time anybody comes somewhere near it.

There is another highly competitive point in the MacBook Air design which really does deserve a mention – Unlike laptops, MacBook Air has a design which would be pretty easy to service. That’s been one of the bugbears of laptops for decades, and that’s the main reason computer repair technicians don’t like servicing them. There’s no claustrophobic clutter in MacBook Air, despite its small size. It could easily be assembled and disassembled without anyone needing counseling. That makes it a commercially particularly competitive product, and could point the way to much better desktop computer design.

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