PriceSCAN Blog: The Air Not There

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The Air Not There

Computers | Feb 11, 08

Failing to find her childhood home on returning to Oakland, Gertrude Stein remarked "There is no 'there' there", and perhaps I'm just as lost given my difficulty locating the "there" in the new MacBook Air.
After all, commentators as esteemed as the Times' David Pogue and the Journal's Walter S. Mossberg have described handling the three-pound, 3/4" thick aluminum laptop as so satisfying a sensory experience that I was reminded of Woody Allen fondling that futuristic joy-inducing silver orb in his film "Sleeper". And in addition to such Apple coolness, the MacBook Air does feature a 13.3 inch screen, large for an ultralight notebook.
But for eighteen hundred bucks the Air delivers a relatively small 80 GB hard drive and just one USB port (the only other external connections are for headphones and an external monitor, so perhaps "Air" could be said to stand for air-gap). You can buy an external USB hub or Ethernet connection, but externals kind of defeat the point of the Air's almost hermetically-sealed elegance. And sealed is the operative word, as the battery is not meant to be removed by the user, and thus cannot be swapped for a spare on the road. When the battery dies, you'll have to pay Cupertino to replace it for you. No CD/DVD drive makes backing up data or loading programs from those media an issue, and of course without carrying an external drive you won't be playing DVD movies at 18,000 feet.
Apple offers solutions to these issues that are, well, quintessentially Apple. Download those movies from the company's store via Wi-Fi (which the Air does have) and if you need to get a tune out of the Air, dump it on an iPod. If you really must install software from a CD or DVD, the Air is sold with Remote Disk, a program which allows the machine to wirelessly access another Mac or PC's CD/DVD drive and use it as an external peripheral.
It's worth noting that Apple is offering a more advanced model with a feature road warriors may appreciate: a flash memory-based 64 GB solid state drive whose lack of a spinning disk may increase durability However, this version (with a 1.8 GHz CPU as opposed to the standard 1.6 GHz model) will run you a rather steep $3,100.
So perhaps it's just me, but all this seems like a fairly expensive way to eschew basic features of power management, data back-up, media/program access and connectivity which I find very useful when traveling. Maybe the Air can work on short trips for those with relatively light computing needs, a high degree of comfort with Apple-dependence (just to change the battery?) and/or a willingness to rely on another computer as the mother-ship. Sure, respectable people may touch this machine with a degree of ardor that borders on the obscene, but for now, I'll continue to insist on the ability to put disks in my laptop - and to be able to take the battery out, all by myself. Like Woody in Sleeper, I think that, no matter the tactile appeal of a machine, there are some things human beings should be able to do for themselves.