Opinion: why is the Macbook Air a full 300 pounds (600 dollars) more expensive than in the US?
MacBook Air - The morning after
Yesterday (15/01/2008) saw the introduction of the MacBook Air into the Apple product portfolio. Apple a renowned for producing high quality professional laptops for the professional IT market, be it the photography industry, music industry, film industry, design industry or computer security industry. How does the MacBook Air fit in with with its other siblings.
Size
The MacBook Air (MBA) is marketed as a sub-notebook or ultra portable. Its small at 13.3" but not too small for full time use. Its very light and very, very thin so its not going to way a ton on long journeys or be difficult to stash away somewhere when you're not using it. From the perspective of a road warrior the physical dimensions of this laptop are perfect.
Technical
From a technical features perspective, however, its a bit of a mixed bag. Unsurprisingly for its size the MBA has no optical disk drive. On the surface this might not be much of an issue, but I think Apple have forgotten that the current MacBooks are popular partly because they have small form-factor without sacrificing features such as a high-end optical drive. In fact the slot loading drive the current Macbook can be seen as a major selling point over its immediate competition.
Also, consider who are likely to use this machine and what they are likely to want to use it for. IT professionals generally use DVD media and CD media quite a bit. Yes, you can use a USB key but last time I checked, software install disks weren't CD keys and you won't always be near a handy desktop machine when you need to install some software or when a client hands you a disk of images or samples (or even a presentation) to load onto your laptop. So unless you are likely to want to carry around an external CD drive this lets out any serious IT professional, especially when given the price
Another issue is the lack of ports. Apple suggest that you can do most things wirelessly these days so its not like you need the ports anyway. But I can imagine situations when this could get very annoying. E.g You have a legacy USB printer or hard-disk and like to use a USB wireless mouse when at home, the MBA only has one (yes thats 1) USB port in total, so now we can't have a mouse and a printer (or hard drive) plugged in at the same time! You could use a port replicator but its a clunky solution given the nature of the problem. There is also no firewire so how do you get footage off your firewire based camcorder? You don't.
Storage is also less than generous which means you are likely to need an external disk or a desktop computer if you are doing any serious volume of work on this thing.
So what do we have?
We seem to have a laptop thats not for professionals given its features set, and not really for consumers either given its price. Yes it looks sexy, but so do Apples other laptops! There seems to be too much compromise for too much money. You can't replace a desktop with it and its too expensive to justify as a machine tethered to a desktop setup.
You are very much paying for style and form factor with this machine, it's not really for professionals. I'd save yourself several hundred pounds and buy a bog standard MacBook instead.
