Well, look at that…

…a rare opportunity to prove that I’m not totally in the bag for Apple.

I didn’t get to see the keynote – I was following it online, like the rest of the peasants, idly hitting refresh every 5 minutes or so while listening to a podcast and waiting for a callback from somebody who’d installed Google Earth and thought their available hard drive space had dropped from 97 GB to 24 GB. (The truth is too saddening to relate so I won’t.) As they checked off every rumored point (turns out even the leaked video of the 1.1.3 update was spot-on), I said, wait for it, wait for it…

And sure enough: MacBook Air. I saw the device, and I saw the specs, and I immediately thought:

Cube.



The MacBook Air (MBA – what a perfect choice of initials) is sleek, stylish, woefully underpowered compared to its peers, and a horrible value for money for 99% of the consumer public. Hell, by the time you pay to add 1 GB of Apple’s expensive RAM to the cheapest MacBook, you’re still getting out for $750 less than it would cost to add Ethernet and DVD pieces to the MBA – and you wind up with a faster system in the MacBook without having to carry any extra bits.

The MBA is basically the dream machine for CEOs, CIOs, other C_O douches and VPs who wish they were. It’s fashionable, it weighs nothing in the designer carry-on briefcase, you can check your email in the first class lounge and watch movies in flight. And that’s it. No FireWire port, so forget about any serious video work. Only one USB port, so forget about any peripheral work heavier than syncing your iPhone. And if you want to use the disc sharing feature to borrow somebody else’s DVD drive, you’ll need to carry around the installer DVD everywhere.

Workstation support staff of the world, I feel your pain. Every prima donna senior manager on earth is going to want one of these things.

At least with the iPhone, you can say yes, overly stylish and expensive and attractive to the kind of swine who became Republicans because of Alex P. Keaton, but it also completely replaces a laptop for two weeks at a time. Mostly, though, it’s a secondary device. The bottom line on the MBA is this: you could not get by with it as the only computer you owned.



Apple’s done some amazing things in the last decade, but this would be the most stunning of all if it works: creating an entirely new market segment for mid-life crisis computers.