

Thin is in: Ars Technica reviews the MacBook Air - auferstehung
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/macbook-air-review.ars

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mattmaroon
My favorite quote: "The next stop along this path of disappointment is battery
life."

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pg
Anyone know if you can buy some kind of auxiliary battery for it? Because
otherwise I'm not getting one after all. 2.5 hours is not enough to get stuff
done on planes. What a disappointment. I was so looking forward to a laptop I
could use without always in the back of my mind thinking about how much time I
had left to finish what I was working on before the computer died.

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ivankirigin
Doesn't an external battery make something designed to be small kinda
pointless?

I wonder what kind of ultra portable could be made that was a simple unix box
with a black & white display and no graphics. It would need to have cell-
network access, which is another thing lots of people are upset that the Air
doesn't have.

Apple basically told everyone: we fit it in an iphone, but we couldn't fit it
in something 10 times the size.

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yummyfajitas
It's already been built (<http://laptop.org/>), except for cell network
access. They also have minimal color and a small amount of graphics. You can
even power it with a hand crank.

As soon as they build one with a bigger keyboard, that's my new machine.

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ivankirigin
Actually, the XO is nothing like what I'm talking about. The screen is too
small, it has color, the keyboard is too small, mesh networking is too new to
be sold as a consumer product, and it is designed for 3rd world non-hacker
children. They are a demographic as close to me as hiphop hacker single moms.

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rms
The XO has a really innovative dual mode screen with a super high DPI black
and white screen with no backlight.

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ivankirigin
You could probably get an even better DPI daylight readable screen if you only
allow for 2 colors. No dual mode.

There are many, many cool things in the XO. Too much for what I'm talking
about.

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fake
Looks like it only shines in a very limited amount of use cases.

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jey
That doesn't matter as long as it shines in the use cases that the average
consumer cares about.

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mattmaroon
I'm guessing those would be battery life and a spindle.

