Ruminating on the MacBook Air

1. On footprints and forms.

Debate about whether or not the MacBook Air is, or deserves to be called, a subnotebook or ultramobile PC exposes some of the philosophy of Apple. Steve Jobs said himself in the keynote: "there's too much compromising on less than a full size display, less than a full-size keyboard". The upshot is that the footprint of the Air is no smaller than that of the other MacBooks¹. However, a lot of people would like a machine that was less wide and deep, no matter how thick it is. The Eee, of course, is the current poster-boy for such people, being the size of a DVD case.

Will Apple ever make a notebook for the people who would otherwise buy an Eee? Probably not, but I don't rule out them making a bigger touch-screen tablet, an iPod touch for the kitchen, if you will. It won't be a Mac, won't have a keyboard, and like the iPhone and touch, it'll be more geared to reading than to creating content (although if you're very lucky, it'll pair with a Bluetooth keyboard)². It also won't be released this year (maybe next?)

Are Apple right to ignore this market? A year ago I'd have said yes. Now, I still think they'll sell plenty of thin, stylish, relatively powerful (but expensive) machines. On the other hand, the cheap, Linux-based small laptops (we really need a category name for these gadgets, and one better than Eee-esque) will probably carve out quite the niche in the next year. Shuttle-based PCs heralded to move to the Mac mini from the Cube, so there'll maybe be a subnotebook to compete with the Eee's successors some years hence.

2. On secondaries and syncing.

John Gruber:

The MacBook Air is undeniably beautiful and clever, but clearly designed as a secondary machine, not a main machine. I like using a notebook as my sole machine, which means I'm almost certain to stick with the Pros.

and I think he's right, and, like him, it's one of the reasons I don't want one. Indeed, the fact is that, for at least five years, it's been perfectly fine to use a laptop as your primary computer. This is handy, because in the decade before that, there was a big problem with laptops: getting them to co-exist with desktops.

Way back in the early 1990s, Douglas Adams wrote about his desire to sync data between his Macintoshes³, and while we now have the option of .Mac (only $99/year, go on), I still don't think syncing is anywhere near a solved problem⁴. Perhaps that's OK, and we'll all end up storing our data in "the cloud", with Google, Flickr, Facebook and so on, but I don't quite know if the world's ready for that yet⁵.

I was intrigued to see that Wil Shipley is keen to get a MacBook Air. I wondered if compiling apps would be slow, and suddenly remembered the existence of Xgrid. I have no idea how well it works (it's not really something I've used in anger), but perhaps that's another part of the secondary machine puzzle, as are photo library management schemes like Fraser Speirs is considering.

All in all, perhaps a secondary machine isn't so much of a problem now, but I'm still not convinced I'd be happy splitting my life in two.

3. On phones and portable data.

Paul Boutin, in a piece entitled MacBook Err:

why has Apple failed to make foolproof, always-on Internet access—the iPhone's killer feature—a standard component of its next generation of computers?

Technically, putting a phone's 3G or better data connection into a computer isn't that hard. Sony did it over two years ago⁶. The problems are economic. Who's the data connection with, and how is it paid for? How do you do deals with providers worldwide⁷? (Remember, the iPhone is only available in four countries, the Kindle⁸ in one.)

Anyway, there are already ways to get online via mobile data connections. Boutin mentions 3G dongles (available in the UK for free, plus £10/month for 1GB of data), but doesn't mention a much more elegant way to go online: Bluetooth to a phone. Nokia's N810 internet tablet, for example, doesn't have 3G, but it does make pairing to (and using the data from) a phone very easy, and Mac OS X isn't exactly hard to configure either. As Tom Insam pointed out, you can even configure it to dial up when needed.

There are, admittedly, two problems here. Firstly, it seems that some (predominantly American?) carriers don't like letting you use your phone like this. The solution there, naturally, is to change carriers, and if you can't, lobby them until they change. Secondly, and more fundamentally, some phones doesn't support the right Bluetooth commands. Bafflingly, one such device is Apple's own iPhone. However, there are far more smartphonese that do Bluetooth dial-up networking than those that don't.

Personally, I'm still not convinced that truly always-on connections are either a good nor profitable idea. I'd find myself distracted and prone to looking up facts rather than debating the more interesting ideas around them, while I wonder if "normal people"⁹ want it? I admit that the same things were said about always-on wired Internet merely a decade ago, but this time perhaps there's a point in resisting technology for its own sake, if only for a few years.

¹ The weight isn't the same, of course, and apparently that's enough for some people. Personally it's never been a great concern.

² People have managed to put Mac OS X on an Eee, and if I had a couple of hundred pounds and some time spare I might be tempted to try it, but to be honest, I think it'd be painful. Apple don't support the latest release of Mac OS X on a machine with a screen smaller than 1024x768, and I think there's a good reason for that. Try setting your Mac to 800x600 and see if you can use iPhoto.

³ He also wrote about the pain of multiple power supplies. Sven-S. Porst touches on the idea of the Mac mini, Time Capsule and so on sharing a single power connector design, and more, in his post about the Macworld announcments.

⁴ Whatever happened to the Windows "Briefcase" feature anyway?

⁵ Having said that, gOS do.

⁶ Well, actually, it was EDGE, which is 2.5G, but you get the idea.

⁷ I still think the chances of a tuner in the Apple TV are basically zero, not just because of the iTunes Store, but also because there's no longer anything like a dominant standard for broadcast television within a given country, let alone worldwide.

⁸ The Kindle, of course, has a built-in EVDO modem. Amazon managed to get away without a service charge for the Kindle, but I doubt that Apple are going to subsidise the sort of use you'd see from a computer as opposed to a specialist device.

⁹ Geeks really need a better way of saying that.