Macopinion

Is The MacBook Air The Most Controversial Apple System Ever?

I can't recall there ever having been an Apple laptop - or for that matter any Apple system, that elicited as passionate a debate as the MacBook Air. Yes, the Cube was controversial, and to some degree the oddball "20th Anniversary Mac" as well. The IIvx and the PowerBook 5300 generated a lot of press, but not a whole lot of disagreement - they were fairly universally panned. Steve Jobs' decision to eliminate the floppy drive from the original iMac and rapidly phase it out on other Apple systems was controversial, but I don't remember it causing the dialectical schism that the MacBook Air has, with Mac Web articles appearing on the same day entitled "Why I Will Definitely Buy A Macbook Air," and "Why I Won't Buy the MacBook Air" respectively and many more aligning themselves in similar fashion.

Some MacBook Air cheerleaders are accusing MacBook Air skeptics of being Luddite whiners resisting the march of progress, while some critics of the Air accuse Air aficionados of being gullible fanboys praising the emperor's new finery.

Personally, I'm somewhere in the middle of all this. The MacBook Air is not what I hoped Apple would bring forth in a subnotebook. I wanted a linear successor to the 12" PowerBook and PowerBook 2400c - small laptops that were still capable of serving as primary production computers with only relatively modest compromises necessary, with a reasonable degree of connectivity, expandability, and upgradability. The MacBook Air fails on all those counts and several others as well, and cannot serve as a desktop substitute without working around massive compromises. Consequently, it's not for me.

On the other hand, I appreciate that there is a cohort of Mac notebook users, perhaps a sizable one - we shall have to wait and see - for whom the light weight, sexy looks, or perhaps both, will grab then enough to adequately mitigate the MacBook Air's manifold functional and performance shortcomings. I'll not disparage their taste and reasoning. I just hope that the diminishment of practicality and emphasis on form over function that the MacBook Air represents does not slop over into the next major revisions of the larger, serious Apple notebooks.

I was skeptical about Apple dumping the floppy drive back in 1998. I was using the floppy drive in my then-workhorse PowerBook 5300 and my older Macs extensively at the time. THe Internet had arrived in this neck of the Nova Scotia woods less than a year earlier, and my transition to online orientation was still in its early stages.

I'll concede in hindsight that Jobs was right about the death of the floppy, although way far ahead of the curve. In 1998, burnable optical disks were still somewhat esoteric and definitely not standard issue, or even available on the original iMac. Nor was the Internet a viable workaround for writable physical media - it still isn't nearly a decade later for those of us who have no broadband access.

At the time, I was pondering my next system upgrade, and initially intended to order the optional floppy drive expansion bay module if I bought a WallStreet PowerBook. In the end, I settled on a SCSI Zip Drive instead as my writable media solution, and my WallStreet, when I did buy it, had only a CD-ROM drive, but there was an annoying and inconvenient necessity for several years to relay archived data from floppies via Zip disks onto my hard drive, and physical transfers of relatively small amounts of data remained an unresolved problem throughout the WallStreet's service life, although mitigated in my case by the fact that I had a UMAX S900 D=desktop tower machine with a nice floppy drive in it.

My next laptop system, a Pismo PowerBook, was acquired used and came with both Zip and SuperDisk expansion bay modules, the latter of which would also read and write 1.4 MB floppies, and facilitated the final stages of my floppy phase-out much more gracefully. Today, all of my production laptops have SuperDrives, and I have three external hard drives as well including a 500 GB unit for Time Machine backups with Leopard.

Eventually, the iMac got a CD-Burning drive, which turned out to be the essential floppy disk replacement, especially when used in tandem with USB thumb drives, and of course the MacBook Air is available with an optional external SuperDrive for $99 extra.

Perhaps the closest historical analog to the MacBook Air is the original clamshell iBook which debuted in 1999 with just a single USB port, plus Ethernet and modem ports, a well short of cutting edge 300 MHz G3 processor, a paltry 32 MB of RAM, and a ridiculously small 3.2 GB hard drive. Unveiling the iBook at Macworld Expo New York, Steve Jobs said that "iBook was designed right from the start to use Apple's revolutionary new AirPort wireless networking for cable-free Internet access.... It’s a liberating experience to surf the Internet from your iBook while freely moving about your home or classroom - without any power or networking cables to tie you down."

Sound familiar? At least the clamshell iBook's RAM and hard drive were upgradable (with great difficulty in the latter instance), but iBook was Apple's first computer ever designed for wireless networking from the start, with two built-in antennas and a slot for the optional ($99) AirPort Card.

Nevertheless, by the end of its production run, the clamshell iBook had FireWire an AV video-out port, more respectable 10 GB and 20 GB hard drives and faster processors, and the second generation iBook had dual USB ports and an available CD-burning Combo drive, so Apple has stepped back from pushing the wireless connectivity concept quite so hard.

But they're back at it with the MacBook Air with a vengeance, but I'm guessing that as before, the MacBook Air will eventually add more conventional. wired connectivity - at least a second USB port.

Personally, while I appreciate the advantages of wireless connectivity, I'm not a thoroughgoing fan or convert my any stretch of the imagination. I prefer the positiveness of hard-wired connections. My PowerBook G4 has Airport built-in, and I have a WiFi card in my Pismo PowerBook, but the only time I use Airport is when I'm (very) occasionally in range of a WiFi hot spot. My home LAN is still hard-wired Ethernet, and I connect to the Internet through a telephone modem. I've tested a fairly wide variety of wireless keyboards and input devices over the past few years for product reviews, but not one of them has ever tempted me to give up my favorite wired peripherals. They all require batteries, which are extra expense, hassle, and in the case of mice compromise ergonomics by adding unwelcome weight and often messing up balance.

Bluetooth pairing and wake-up lag are a pain, other wireless devices require USB dongles which occupy precious USB ports (the two USB ports on my PowerBook plus a 4-port hub are always full at my workstation and I still end up doing a lot of cable swapping - that single, lonely USB port in the MacBook Air just will not do), and every wireless pointing device I've tested has a maddening (at least to me) response latency.

I expect that eventually I will be dragged kicking and screaming into the wireless vortex. Broadband Internet, when it eventually gets here (projected sometime before the end of 2009), will be a wireless service, and more and more peripherals are going wireless. When there are no practical alternatives, I'll have to grin and bear it, but I'm not ready yet.


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cmoore@macopinion.com


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