I Take Back All the Mean Things I Said About Crapple

That Air laptop looks like Apple being at it's best again: pushing a form factor further than anyone has done, and give it an excellent design at the same time.

But perhaps the biggest missed opportunity is that it doesn't seem to have a touch screen. Maybe it wasn't possible with the screen technology. I have been using a Toshiba tablet PC with touch screen recently, and the added value of it is just amazing. In the middle of a business meeting, you can start drawing and annotating on top of a slide, very intuitively using a little pen on the display. Then you just save & print the result and hand them out. It adds quite a new level of flexibility.

An Air laptop with touch screen sounds like the holy grail for road warriors.

 

Remember that internet speed is minuscule compared to speeds of your home network. Gigabit ethernet is really, really fast and I use it to transfer gigabytes of data frequently. My plan is to get a Macbook Air and use a Time Capsule for data that I will only need at home, and the internal HD for data that I will need when traveling.

 

It is not "my way."

The fact that I did not like the test methodology does not mean that I don't agree with the conclusion.

When I finally got an HDTV last year, I bought a 720p Sharp Aquos. The 1080p version was 85% more expensive than the 720p which was on sale at Costco at the time. I could not discern any difference between the quality of the images displayed by these two sets, let alone one that justified the price premium.

 

It would definitely be an out-of-the-box innovation for the MacBook notebooks, but I suspect the objective (for this iteration at least) was light weight. Look at how Steve Jobs presented the Air - packaged in an interoffice mail envelope that he just casually opened up and lo and behold, there was... an Air inside....

 

I agree with your concept of internal network and traveling objective. However, my experience is that invariably something gets left behind unless the whole drive is accessible. My really, really, really critical files are backed up onto a partition on my .mac account; but there are work-in-progress (or older archived) files that I may need to access based on requirements that are hard to predict. So, for me, it is either have a high speed (broadband) connection to a file store or take the files with me.

 

Hmm. Okay, if *I* were to design the "Air Tablet" mine would have the ability for the screen to fold completely back so I could flip it over and use just the screen as a tablet. The keyboard would be on the back and to ensure that there was no interference you'd have to have the ability to disable the keyboard when in "tablet mode". And I'd also want the ability to choose "portrait" or "landscape" mode when using it as a tablet.

With the screen flipped back and the keyboard enabled, I've got a laptop.

Or am I just too outside the box?

 

While Apple hasn't done this yet, these have existed for a while.

 

I also like the looks of the Air.... but for the price, Lenovo makes a very thin Vista laptop that has gigabit ethernet, as well as internal cell phone card. So you get more for the money and there are no compatibility issues.

 

Still not sold. I prefer my media in a form I can collect. And until downloads are without error, I am not convinced that downloading movies is a viable alternative.

I am slightly old school on this, I'm afraid.

 

That looks pretty thick and heavy.

And I really hate the swivel thing. Looks like a prime weak point to me.

I couldn't see if it did both portrait and landscape as it didn't say.

Lenovo would probably mean Microsoft Vista. Uh....no thanks.

(Isn't Lenovo made in China?)

 

Actually, not at all outside the box. That form factor exists for a while already in the PC world, and is called a tablet PC. Toshiba has it, as do Lenovo, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP and certainly others.

There is even more exotic stuff like the tiny HTC advantage, where you can simply detach the keyboard (it snaps on magnetically), and work on the touch screen alone. Or there is the new HTC shift, were the keyboard can shift away under the screen, much like a slider phone (HTC is actually a phone company).

 

So are many Apple products including all the MacBooks.

From Apple's Annual Report:

 

But Apple is an American brand and must meet those specifications.

Isn't Lenovo a Chinese company?

 

Definitely means Vista.

Taiwan if memory serves. IBM sold their PC division to Lenovo. A lot of U.S. citizens that were working for the PC division lost their jobs after that one. Nothing like the wholesale de-industrialization of America.

 

At this point, I doubt if any notebooks are made in the U.S.A. We invented the notebook computer; now we have to import them from outside of the U.S.A. Nothing like de-industrialization.

 

I'm not sure if it's been covered.. i see everyone ripping on the new mac air. It has an option for a superdrive. It even has the option for a 60 or 80 gig flash drive.. er.. ram drive.. er.. whatever you want to call it.. they call it a static state drive.

for those that don't know what that is... that will make that little mac a pretty fast machine. i've created a few ramdrives on my desktop in the past. load times are remarkable.

if this works as well as i think it does.. everything should only take seconds to load.

 

That is the idea. However, I am wondering about the relatively small size (~64Gb) of the flash drive. That could fill up pretty quickly.

 

(corrected my miss read)

it's an 64gig solid state drive. plus 2 gigs of built in ram.. how can that run slow?

 

if it fills up.. get an external. the point is that the operating system and everything normal that you use will load fast.

they added a back up program so you can automatically save everything to an external