

Macbook Air - Few Pics - seren6ipity
http://gizmodo.com/345051/apple-macbook-air-looks-absolutely-amazing

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ivankirigin
I've been thinking about an ideal working setup. Lots of people fantasize
about these things.

I used to have two 24" monitors with a pansy dell laptop to power them.

Now I have just a 17" MacBookPro. It's excellent, but I could use more pixels.

The ideal setup would be a MacPro with 2 30" screens, with something like
MacBook Air setup to mirror my configuration.

It would be docked like my iPhone, auto-install software that I install on the
desktop, auto-configure to match the relevant system settings, auto-update the
local repository that I'm developing, etc.

Any time, when you need portability, you could take the Air.

I'm sure a simple script could get most of this done on a local wireless
network. Too bad I don't have $13K to spend on it ... yet.

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ivankirigin
To be technically correct, the ideal monitor setup is N M" screens, where N is
1 greater than your current number, each currently (M-2)"

~~~
tb
I believe that ideal monitor count goes up in a Fibbonaci sequence. e.g. When
I had two monitors, I wanted three - now that I have three, I reckon five
would be brilliant.

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Zak
I see one major downside to this machine: it has memory soldered to the
motherboard. In my experience, memory is a fairly high-failure item, and I've
seen more than one laptop bricked by onboard memory failing. It's potentially
worse with a very thin machine since the memory is less protected.

If you're planning to keep one of these beyond the warranty period, know
somebody with SMT soldering equipment.

~~~
sspencer
Not to mention the "Integrated Battery." If the batteries are as failure prone
as normal batteries, this would worry me. And what about traveling? Is TSA
going to take me to a windowless room for not removing my laptop battery?
Also, they project a lifetime of 18 months. Kind of low for the price point.

Seems less a practical upgrade and more of a pretty rich kid's toy. Especially
when my choices for a hard drive are a $1000 64 GB drive (yeah, yeah SSD. Not
worth 1K to me) or an incredibly slow 4200 80 GB drive. Ugh.

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gibsonf1
The integrated battery is a real flaw. 2 years is usually max (if you're
lucky) on batteries. What to do then? Hmmm.

~~~
Zak
Disassemble and replace the cells, of course! This is _hacker_ news, not shiny
consumer product review.

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ardit33
I don't know, but what's the big hoopla about it? It is very thin, and light,
but at $1,800 you are paying very dearly for a machine like that it is not
that powerful.

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gibsonf1
The power of it is being able to easily take it wherever you want. Right now I
have a very powerful Dell Inpiron 9400, and it is _heavy_. I only take it on
major trips. With the Mac Air, I can easily take it with me whenever I need it
without a second thought. Also, I want to use if for remote coding, and with
sbcl/emacs/slime, it is plenty powerful.

Killer feature: extreme portablility with very good power.

And.. It is simply beautiful. It looks like a dream from a futuristic scifi
movie. In fact, this may be the most beautiful computer to date - but I have
to see it in person to confirm. (I still remember going crazy over the Next
computer when it came out)

~~~
ardit33
Yes, I have that dell too, and it is powerful and heavy. But, for 1800, you
can buy that, and the Asus Eee PC, so you can have them both, one very
powerful machine, and one very portable one, for even cheaper than the Mac
air.

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dcurtis
The Eee is ugly, slow, and gimpped, so I wouldn't consider that a very good
option. Unless all you do is surf the web and check email (and absolutely
nothing else).

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uuilly
I think the best part is the mouse gestures. It doesn't actually add any
functionality that you didn't have before but it makes the whole experience
more organic and you forget you're using a computer. That's what apple does
right.

This machine is a big step b/c it's shedding unnecessary historical devices
like the optical drive. It's leaping into a world where there is always a
connection between machines and to the internet. All the while they are
meeting and sometimes surpassing old functionality with software that makes
networking a lot easier (bonjour, time-capsule etc.) While slashdot is
lamenting the lack of "options" apple is striving toward a machine with no
ports and no keyboard. They want as little friction as possible between you
and your experience. The macbook air is just a temporary stop-off on this
trajectory.

~~~
Zak
Apple is sometimes a bit premature about dropping legacy tech. They eliminated
the floppy drive from all their models before USB flash drives were common,
for example. The lack of an optical drive is appropriate for a subnotebook,
but I've found myself needing wired ethernet quite a bit during the past year.

Of course, there are USB ethernet adapters, but that takes up the only USB
port. There are USB hubs, but at that point there's enough random crap to
carry around to negate much of the compactness of this machine.

~~~
derefr
Thus comes a complementary product, the Airport Express. Normally just a
wireless router with an AirTunes doodad, it could be remarketed in this case
as the Air's "wireless-to-Ethernet adapter."

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Zak
Do they have some new gigabit wireless protocol I didn't know about? If not,
it will take about 20 times as long to transfer a large amount of data.

~~~
derefr
Not quite gigabit. I think I read somewhere that
<http://www.apple.com/wifi/80211/> can hit around 160 megabits, though.

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gibsonf1
Now that is a _sweet_ looking machine.

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mhb
Agreed. But I wish they would stop mentioning how thick it is at the edge.

~~~
gibsonf1
Perfection is difficult :)

