It's a Cloud Machine.
The new MacBook Air is a unique piece of hardware. It's going to be the subject of a lot of discussion in the next few days, as people pick apart the innards like so many vultures. Battery life and storage aside, I think the MacBook Air represents a drastic departure in the world of computing, and a welcome one. It's a cloud machine. It's not meant to be a primary environment, but rather, an attactive ephemeral one.
Increasingly, as a society, we're storing our data online. I know that for my business, one of our mail servers supports Address Book and iCal sync, so that I can get my calendar anywhere, and my addresses anywhere. I can login via Safari or Firefox, or download a conduit from my server to sync with the iCal and Address Book applications. My email works the same way. Check my webmail, or set up Mail.app with IMAP to view any of my accounts.
Flickr? Well, it's iPhoto for the cloud. All my images are stored there, and if I provide my authentication key, I can grab full res originals. The iDisk is an equivalent for documents, though only for .Mac members. Google Apps for your domain is yet another service-based equivalent. But, as you can see, there's a bunch of your information stored out there, so who cares if you've only got an 80GB internal drive in the MacBook Air, there's a whole internet out there full of your data that you can quickly pull down via 802.11n or one of the USB-enabled Wireless-provider appliances.
So, the Air is an interesting step forward. It's not meant to be your primary machine, but rather the easy-to-tote one that you take onto airplanes and out to off-site meetings. Me, I'll keep carrying my MacBook Pro, as it's eminently luggable in its current state and better equipped. But should my shoulder go out again, or should I lose my WoW addiction, the MacBook Air becomes an incredibly attractive option. It's capable, for sure, of running Leopard well, and with most of my data stored out in the Cloud, I can easily retrieve and store useful information in native formats without having to worry about where things are and how they're kept.
Comments:
Tonight while surfing in bed I watched as my wife got out of bed to go and check her email. She is the perfect candidate for a MBA. Low document retrieval. High server-based email usage. And she can count on her left hand the amount of times she's needed to use an optical drive. I'm still holding out for a smaller MacBook Pro but may settle for a 15" sometime this year.
Posted by KB on January 22, 2008 — 12:06 AM