by Kay Andrews

Created on: January 17, 2008

The MacBook Air. It looks cool, sounds cool, and has had buzz since it was introduced earlier this week, but am I not sold. I have been using Apple products since OSX 10.1 was released six years ago. Overall I have been very pleased with Apple hardware and software, but there are a couple lessons that long-term mac users know.

If you are thinking of buying an Air, my first reaction is don't. Why? It is a first generation Apple product. Anyone who buys the product will basically become Apple's public beta tester. This can be said about any new technology product, but I've had experience. The first Mac I purchased was a first gen Snow White 14" iBook. As the first non-clam shell iBook, it had a design flaw with the logic board. Apple did extend the repair warranty and it was sent back to Apple several times during that period. (To Apple's credit, once they admitted the flaw I did receive an upgraded combo drive and OS 10.3 upgrade free of charge.)

That being said, I'm still not sold. A driveless notebook is not new. My first laptop was 233Mhz Sony Viao that was less than 1" thick and about the size of a 8.5x11" sheet of paper. In fact, it was about the size of a 1 subject notebook. The first thing I had to buy for it was an external CD-Rom as all it came with was an external disk drive. Over all it was not a bad machine, but having to hook up an external drive could get annoying. Especially if you happen to leave the drive at home or the office. With the Air, you have to have another system from which to install new software via a wireless connection. While this may work for some, but the other problem is with back ups. I still like to back up my iTunes purchases and business records to physical DVD's. They are smaller and easy to store in a safe deposit box at the bank. I can't do this with an Air. At least not without buying an external burner or without another machine/or device.

But let's compare what is under the hood. When compared side by side with the other Apple laptop offerings, the only advantage the Air offers is size and "Wow" factor.

Hardware Specs
The chip is a Core2Duo with offerings in 1.6 and 1.8 Ghz. It comes with 2GB of Ram standard, but 144MB is shared with the Intel GMA X1300 graphics adaptor. 144MB on a video card is odd. It also has a 13.3" screen with reported 1920x1080 (HD) output. The 80GB Harddrive is tiny for those of us in the video production world and the 64GB Solid-State drive is cool, it's even smaller. Final Cut Studio currently

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