So the King of the Zealots released their new stroke-worthy laptop today, the MacBook Air. A name not only inspired by its wispy dimensions but also by everyone’s sudden push to “BE GREEN!”. I’ll cordially explain what I see are the highlights before I tear the Air a new asshole.
It looks sexy, but that’s nothing new for the these guys. At its girthiest the Air measures .76″ thick, damned skinny, and only 3 lbs. A widescreen frisbee, to be sure. You can outfit it with your choice of 1.6ghz or 1.8ghz core 2 duos, 2gb of ram and an 80gb hdd, or you can pay an assload ($1299) more for a 64gb solid-state drive. There’s no optical drive, 1 usb port, audio out and mini-dvi out. The internal battery allows you 5 hours. The touchpad is multitouch. There it is.
Alright…while thinner is better, the screen portion of this fuck is reportedly .16″ thin, meaning that the most expensive portion of your new Air is extremely susceptible to a simple torque-n-snap. Rendering you with nothing but a brown envelope full of shattered dreams and mac parts. My dell may weigh twice as much as this thing, but i’ve never worried about snapping it in half when I yawn in its general direction.
Ultraportables have never featured optical drives, so if you really wanna wow me, scrape some of the budget from your commercials that annoy even the Zealots and pour that capital into making an optical drive fit in this bugger. It may add 0.2″, but you’d win more points…and be able to charge $400 more for the upgrade! Instead of an included drive, you have to pay $99 for the add-on usb. Need a wired RJ45 port? pay more for that too.
What these un-included options come down to is the fact that when I use my laptop, I use it as a computer system…including all of its parts. If I was a traveling journalist or something, this might entice me…however, as always, unless you absolutely need to have a mac, you can find a comparable windows ultraportable laptop for much less. But if you’re a fashionisto, you’ll need to show everyone that you bent over and bought a Mac.
…and one last thing. Knock it off with the Green bullshit. When I go to toss out junkmail or a plastic bottle or a wad of chewing gum I’ll aim for the trash, but don’t try to entice me to buy a laptop by giving me an “environmental status report“. Stop pandering and give me real fucking reasons why this thing is worth $400 or $500 more than your competitor’s laptop. You want to impress me with your treehugging shit? Make the circuit boards out of cornmeal and power the thing with mummified eel penis. Cover the touchpad with penguin belly and the keys with polished hippo teeth. A petrified newt eye for a power switch, that’s natural, man.
Okay, I lied…one last last thing. Jobby Jobs explained that while this little papercut doesn’t have an optical drive, it’s bundled with software called “Remote Disc” to allow you to ‘borrow’ the optical drive from another Mac or *gasp* a PC that you have networked to it! I could barely get through telling Redscape how “innovative” it was that Apple would tout the ability to share a drive across a network when I read the following on the Apple Store page:
Remote Disc: An innovative feature that allows you to access the DVD or CD drive of a nearby Mac or Windows PC. It’s perfect for installing software and retrieving files.
Holy batshit! They actually implied that sharing a network drive is an innovative Apple feature! Jesus-tapdancing-Christ!
That’s my superficial take. If Apple didn’t market themselves as the greatest company in the universe, I’d prolly be less apt to piss on all of their ‘innovations’…but they do so I piss. Want an honest-to-zealot review? Wait a few weeks until Beardo breaks the bank on some Air.
PS – Redscape reports that while Apple also released some apps for the iPod Touch (the exact same ones that come with the iPhone), they expect you to pay $20 for them, even though you should have gotten them with you Touch in the first place. Can’t wait to see the commercial where the Mac Fag explains to PC McNerd how Apple’s reinvented software pricing with that gem.
