Stopped by the Tyson’s Corner Apple Store to check out the MacBook Airs. My initial impressions weren’t all that favorable, but having never touched one in person, I thought it might be best to make an informed opinion.
It looks pretty sweet in all the photos and promo materials, but seeing the thing in person is quite slick. The keyboard took a bit of getting used to. It’s full sized and all, but the feel is all weird. There’s a lot of board space between the keys and they don’t make that clicky sounds or have that click resistance I’m used to with other keyboards. But it’s a minor cosmetic thing that’s easy enough to deal with. The touch response is excellent. The angle of the main body is such that the butt of the machine never touches the heel of your palm. Kinda makes you feel like your hands are floating as you’re typing.
The touch pad is bigger so that you can wicky wicky with your fingers for all the nifty navigation motions. I liked the two-finger scroll jutsu for paging up and down. And using three fingers to page back and forth made me feel like an awesome DJ. Pinching to zoom in and zoom out is quite cool and I wish I could have tried it with Photoshop. As an aside, if Wacom put some of that functionality into the Cintiq, the gesture based navigation, that would streamline my workflow infinitely!
The basic model wasn’t loaded with anything useful, no Photoshop, Final Cut, or even Word so I wasn’t able to see if I could crash the sucker. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I always try to crash the in-store Macs. The new iMovie was loaded and I noticed quite a bit of lag when opening the thing and using the iSight camera. Not such a big deal when you’re recording video and I’m sure it edits just fine.
So, ignoring the price tag for a moment here, I was quite impressed. Load this sucker with Keynote and Photoshop and it makes a perfect companion for doing presentations and workshops on the go. And if all you do with a laptop is write papers, send email, make spreadsheets, this is a perfect piece of kit for you. I could even see vloggers and podcasters using it for remotes and interviews. The lack of optical drive is still upsetting. Say I want to watch Enter the Dragon for the millionth time. I either have to shell out for that external drive, rent it from the iTunes store, or illegally rip the thing. There might be a flash drive solution coming down the pike for watching movies on your computer, but we’ll talk about that in a bit. Business people who don’t want to worry about installing anything anyway would love this thing. Just get your fully loaded Air from IT and head off to that conference in Barbados. It certainly won’t replace your main box, but I think it has some real practical uses.
However, when you take a look at the price tag, the sexiness wears off. Though it has practical uses for new media producers like vloggers and podcasters, the cost places it well beyond an amateur producer’s budget. That leaves just the business community. They don’t care much about features or specs or optical this or solid state that. They want a machine that works without much mucking about and Macs are certainly low maintenance.
For the Air to be successful, Apple should be focusing its marketing materials on the business professional. Thus far, they’re highlighting its sex appeal. It fits in an envelope, you can molest its key pad, it fits in an envelope. So what. This general approach might work for an iPod, but unless they focus in on the business community specifically, there’s an entire market that won’t pay attention to the hype.
So yes, very very sexy. And I probably wouldn’t stop someone from throwing one at me. But shelling out $1799 to bring sexy back is a little steep. Until I’m making millions and traveling the world making business deals, I’ll just have to drool from afar.
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