MacBook Air

MacBook Air

As a user of mostly Mac products (I used to use mostly Windows products in the past and if the business need is there, I'll use Windows products again), I was interested in the shipment of Macbook Air. While this device looks fantastic, it's ultralight, ultraslim, I also think it's ultra-underpowered (at least from looking at it's specs) to be a real laptop replacement (well at least for me, if you're doing simple Word Processing, it could be the device for you).

It's short-comings are:

1. A small drive, yes it's solid state, but since when does solid state give me the extra 250GB that I need? I've got 500GB on my MacBook Pro and I'm running out of space, especially since it's the center of all my iTunes activity, so any movies, music, pictures, etc... are on my laptop.
2. 2GB RAM, give me a break, my MBP was running well with 4GB, but it didn't start running great until I installed 8GB (which I had to do by removing and not using my existing 4GB, if you need 4GB of MBP RAM, let me know, I've got it laying around).
3. 2 USB ports. This would be good until you realize that it doesn't have an ethernet port. So for offices like mine that don't support wifi, you're down to one USB port. For me this would mean that I'd need to get a USB hub to work (mainly because of the fact I'm continually swapping drives, and phones in and out of my computer, part of the joy of being in Mobile development).
4. No Ethernet port, sigh... See above.
5. No build in 3G. Since it's not a laptop, at least in my mind, you'd have thought they would have worked out an arrangement with AT&T and shove 3G into this device. Then it could be useful.
   

It's strengths are:

1. It's not an iPad, meaning you can do work on it, load a real Word Processor, real browser, Flash, etc...
2. It's quite, though to be honest the drive in my MBP isn't that noisy. So I'm not sure how much to give it credit here.
   
3. It's thin and light - All my computers have been smaller (15" - 5-6lbs), but these get heavy after a while. A nice thin laptop could be the way to go for someone who needs something light.
   

In the end if you're looking for a device that's more computer than iPad, well it's the device for you. If you're looking for something that's a full fledged laptop, then get an MacBook Pro, I'd hesitate at suggesting which Windows machine is the best since the hardware all seems to be very bad now. My last decent PC was a ThinkPad (it was a warrior).