Quote:
Originally Posted by philodox
Lets compare it to their current laptops... less powerful, no Ethernet port, very few other ports, can't replace the battery, no optical drive. And the only thing it has over them? It's thin. I just don't see paying more money for something that has one advantage with so many disadvantages. If I really wanted an ultra mobile laptop, I'd get an EEE PC and mod the crap out of it as they come with a solid state drive by default and are very well priced. If you want the solid state option on the Macbook you are paying $3k in the end.
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Well, if you look at any company's ultra-portable laptop (Sony, Fujitsu, Toshiba, Lenovo, etc.) they're all a bit less powerful, a bit less full featured, have a smaller screen, have smaller batteries and you'll pay a price premium for the light weight/portability. There will always be some trade offs, these compromises are not unique to the Air. Apple with the Macbook Air has just decided to push the envelope a bit in terms of shaving the hardware down to their vision of the bare functional essentials without compromising the user experience (big screen, full sized keyboard, mousepad gestures and most importantly OS X).
The comparison to the EEE PC on features and/or price is like comparing apples to oranges (little bitty ones) I'm afraid. Can you really fairly compare the Celeron CPU and 4 GB SDD in the EEE, the smaller/lower resolution screen, the smaller keyboard, mass produced plastic construction to the Air with it's Core 2 Duo CPU, it's solid/beautiful aluminum chassis, larger screen, full sized keyboard and much larger (and almost impossibly pricey) 64 GB SDD in the Air? Really?
If you want (and have the expertise) to modify an EEE PC to your liking to vaguely approximate what features you'll get with an Air, go ahead as it's a really cool project/hack. But don't discount the amount of time, energy and expertise that will be needed (which most folks don't have). Most importantly, for me anyways, is the value of being able to run a very full featured/usable/stable OS X (legally, yes I know folks have gotten the EEE to run OS X albeit rather sluggishly), the option to boot/run virtualized instances of multiple other OS's (XP, Vista, Linux, BSD, etc) and have the rest of the stuff "just work".
Personally, my time is better spent getting work done, not figuring out how to hack stuff to work (sort of/most of the time). To claim you're not you're getting nothing at all for the added expense of the Air is really not accurate.
I'm afraid you're just not Apple's target audience for this product. It doesn't mean that the Air doesn't hold some significant value/functionality for someone else, especially as a laptop that is a clean/integrated/ergonomic design that will "just work" right out of the box.
Dave