[Shacs] Apple Releases World's Thinnest Notebook Computer

[ekeown at swbell.net]

It's very cool and light, but three quirks they fail to mention in the sales pitch:

It's factory sealed, meaning:
1) You can't replace or upgrade the hard drive
    - OK, not a huge deal because if you use all the hard drive space on a machine that is no means meant to be a desktop replacement (it doesn't have an optical drive) it's probably old and therefore by Apple's standards out of date, and two they offer pretty good service on their machines if you don't mind going to an apple store or sending it off.

2) You can't upgrade of replace the RAM
    - This is a bit of a bigger issue to me because while we all know that laptops aren't generally upgrade friendly, it's nice to know that you can always add more RAM to get a little more performance out of the machine.

3) You can't replace the battery
    - This is the biggest issue for me.  The battery is internal and therefore sealed...so no spare battery, and worse, when the battery decides to loss it's charge capacity, you have to be without your machine while Apple get around to replacing the battery for you.

As I mentioned there is no optical drive which isn't that big of deal since there is always the option to use an external drives, and they have a piece of software you can put on other machines so the MacBook Air can use their optical drives.  Also the machine excluded a network port choosing to go exclusively wireless.  Again these are both very minor issues, especially compared to the whole factory sealed issue.

To me, these factory sealed issues are the kind that should be found in something like the OLPC XO-1, not a system you paid $1800 for.  Thin is neat and compact is neat, but to me they shouldn't sacrifice such common features, at a premium no less.

Eric

----- Original Message ----
From: Dr. Tim McGuire <mcguire at shsu.edu>
To: shacs at shsu.edu
Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2008 3:36:54 PM
Subject: [Shacs] Apple Releases World's Thinnest Notebook Computer


This is one sleek computer.  The question is: "Is it usable?"
 
http://www.apple.com/macbookair/guidedtour/

-- 
Timothy J. McGuire, Ph.D.
Department of Computer Science
Sam Houston State University
Huntsville, Texas  77341-2090
(936)294-1571    mcguire at shsu.edu    http://www.shsu.edu/~csc_tjm/


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