The Worst Laptop With the Best Design (MacBook Air)

Yesterday, Steve Jobs brought the MacBook Air to the world in a big way. The initial design is amazing. A notebook you can fit inside a manila envelope that features two gigs of RAM, an 80 gig hard drive with 64 gig flash option, and a new flavor of multi-touch goodness. This notebook has all the bells and whistles that one comes to expect from Apple over the past decade.

Steve Jobs has predicted the end of the optical drive, which has a portion of the tech community blinking in thought over what this means. It means that in order to achieve this thin architecture, there was no room for the components of an optical drive. This reminds me of the day Steve Jobs gave all the reasons that video was not going to be on the iPod, only to add it to the feature list once they discovered how to play video on a device without sacrificing size. I’ll predict that an optical drive will continue to be available on future releases of the PowerBook and MacBook. The fact that you have to rely on a networked system that allows you install software to utilize their optical drives in order to take advantage of the technology on the go is rather annoying. Burning a disc for a client on the road is still common practice, as is watching a DVD. Let’s face it, 80 gigs doesn’t store as much content as it used to. There are of course workarounds, though I can see a portion of the potential buyers of this new system being turned away by this.

If you are on a trip that takes longer than four or five hours, you will find yourself in dire need of an outlet should you need to do some work on the plane or wherever you may traveling. Being unable to carry extra batteries to give yourself extra time when unable to reach a plug is a strong setback for mobile users. Should the battery go bad, you’ll need to bring it in for servicing and pay $129.00 for a new battery.

This is a brilliant design, and one I am very happy is coming to the world of portables, though it appears that it is not quite ready for prime time. Just as with the iPhone early adopters that long for 3G, I’m going to hold out for second or third gen before grabbing one of these ultra-thin wonders. Great job Apple, despite these minor setbacks.

Matt Ryan