Rubbing our noses in it this time

How hard can it be? What I want (and I know I'm not alone in this) is a 12" (ok, these days 13" if you must) MacBook Pro. With an optical drive built in. And user upgradeable RAM and hard-drive. And battery. With a pukka graphics card.

Such a machine would already be as thin and as light as I care about, and as capable as I want. But I can't have one, apparently. I could have this new "air" frippery–and doesn't it photograph well? Don't you love they way that in that 3/4 overhead shot you can't see the bulge underneath and it looks even thinner that it actually is? But really, a laptop with a off-board optical drive? Well, maybe that's the future, what with renting movies on iTunes and what have you, but...

Apple (ie, Jonathan Ive) have gotten really good at recycling a forty year old design language for products that pundits often hate and (partly because) the public loves, but this gadget seems a little too far ahead of its time. Ah well.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Now that Apple has made its intentions clear and we know that we'll never get a 12" PB (i.e. one that will open in economy seating), maybe it's time to look again at a white MacBook. Half the price, longer (replaceable) battery, no peripherals. By the time it's due for replacement, they'll have sorted out the wrinkles in the Air and dropped the price. And I can get Kingston or Crucial memory for 1/10th (!!) of the Apple price.

keithb said...

Maybe. I only just recently stopped using my G4 TiBook (it got to the point that too many contemporary JavaScript-infested websites brought it to its knees), so a current macBook should have plenty of horsepower for almost all of what I do.

But there's that embedded graphics...I have a mini, with which I am generally very pleased (although they do need 2G of RAM for sure) and that's basically a folded-up macBook. I thought that I wouldn't notice the embedded graphics, since I don't do video editing or what have you, but actually I do. The ancient ATI card in the TiBook doesn't have the frame-rate of the mini (too much action in a DVD and it stalls), but the mini starts to groan under relatively simple sketchup models, certainly simpler than the TiBook can handle. Bugger.

Or there's the thinkpad/linux option...

Adamos Loizou said...

Well, the Air is a little bit out there, but I remember that when the first iPods were out, the whole idea seemed out of space (to me at least), having big HDs and such a high price ... Eventually Apple had to drop the adamant posh act and go for the iPod shuffles and minis to a get bigger piece of the action, but the big iPods would still sell. iPhones are expensive, but still I had to buy one because they are SO COOL! So you never know ... Apple has a weird way of introducing products that belong to the future and still get people excited about them so much that they actually endorse it. It is definitely a psychological-fashion mojo going on. They present their products as desirable, simple, friendly and status-elevating. It works!