Travis and Susie were asking me about the fancy thin Macbook Air and whether or not I would purchase one for myself. Granted, they are very light, very portable, and incredibly cool on the “nerd scale” but, to me, there are a couple of problems that I wouldn’t put up with in a consumer product.
Non-removable Battery
The big one for me is the fact the battery doesn’t come out of the machine. Having a battery that you can’t physically remove is wrong on a laptop. I understand the requirement of a device like a phone (although, most phones have batteries that easily pop out) and an iPod since the batteries tend to live a lot longer than the products themselves but laptops don’t. Unless you drop it in a pond, laptops outlive their batteries and not being able to replace it yourself isn’t a good thing. Also, with Apple’s terrible record on how they build their products, I would have thought the first thing they would have done. Are they going somewhat backwards in creating computer waste?
Non-upgradable
This isn’t so bad since most laptops tend to last a long time and perform just how the owner’s want them to but when these machines go outside of their warranty – this type of laptop would almost put you into the poor house. I don’t think people will want to spend $1900 on a laptop every couple of years. I know it is asking a lot of the manufacturer with custom hardware like this but they’ve done it in the past and other laptop producers have built products with similar weights and size and still have had user-serviceable parts.
Obsolete
Apple is famous for for their ability to create products with a fixed life span. No upgrades and a lack of anyone’s ability to do anything outside of a warranty isn’t good.
Dependence Upon Wireless
This isn’t something new in the laptop world but, wow, a laptop that is almost entirely dependent upon wireless technology. As cool as that is, the majority of the population of the world don’t have wireless. If we lived in a wireless city then it may be more interesting but my mom would have troubles and she is quite techy.
Final Word
I give this laptop a thumbs down mainly on those three points but I don’t think it is bad laptop. It will fit into many hard core Mac user’s arsenals quite nicely – but I don’t think it is for mainstream adoption quite yet. Let’s see what happens with the next version of it and I hope the improvements are there.
Shane Birley is a blogger, huge geeky nerd, web developer, poet, and creative writer based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.