Hooray for Steve Jobs and his Reality Distortion Field!

[missroserose]

Now, I'm not exactly what you'd call an Apple Devotee quite yet - while I admit a lot of their products are cool, most of them aren't really things I need or want. So I wasn't really hyped about MacWorld as, say, Brian is.

However, I am a computer geek, and therefore just susceptible enough to Steve Jobs' famed RDF to have to admit that the newly announced MacBook Air is way, way cool.

I have no particular desire to own one - my MacBook (which I still love) cost almost $600 less, is all of one inch thick, and weighs a whopping five pounds - but Jesus Christ that is one sexy machine.

To be honest, I'm actually more interested in one of the more humdrum new products introduced - the Time Capsule, in large part because we were thinking of doing something very similar ourselves with an Airport Extreme and an external hard drive. Integrated one-button network backup? Awesome. Plus we can use it as a streaming network drive for lossless audio, which was our original intent...

Comments

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

Looks kind of pricey, and the performance seems less than the MacBook, much less the MacBook Pro.

But...solid-state hard drive? Oooooooh.

[cyranocyrano.livejournal.com]

Sweet Jesus. A terrabyte of storage.

[roseneko.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't really know about performance, and it's definitely pricey - sub-notebooks are by definition (although I'm told that the flagship Sony model is almost twice that price). Computers in this class appear to be for people who think that carrying around a five-pound laptop is just too much to bear. Which, admittedly, may be true a certain segment of the population - though the rest of them are just whiny lardasses.

That said, what I'm "Ooooooo"ing over is the design - it looks like some sort of alien technology, or a UFO, or something. If that's the future, then sign me up. =D

[roseneko.livejournal.com]

Isn't that awesome? And five years from now we're going to be all "Yeah, I remember when that seemed like more than we'd ever need, but then I started ripping all of my CDs in lossless audio..."

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

It's pretty sleek looking.

But the solid-state disk is good because it represents that we're finally, FINALLY, going to move past the one great bottleneck in system performance these days, much worse even than the CPU-to-RAM bottleneck, which is the RAM-to-disk one. Hard disks can be more than 1,000,000 (yes, one MILLION) times slower than RAM. That's a HUGE performance bottleneck, and is due entirely to the fact that hard disks have mechanical parts.

But a solid-state drive, which has no moving parts, is much much faster. Flash drives are not as fast as RAM yet, but they're still a massive improvement over a hard disk, at least in terms of latency. (A good one has better throughput, too.)

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think I'm going to recommend we pick up a Time Capsule for work. If I can't spend my money, at least I can spend someone else's.... (But $500 for one TB isn't bad.)

Not the most earth-shattering MacWorld ever, but I'm grooving on TC much more than anything else. The Macbook Air is...neat, but still a bit pricey for me. Something feels wrong about that disproportionate of a money-to-weight ratio.

[roseneko.livejournal.com]

It does. Honestly, I think the Air is aimed at either business execs (perhaps as a way to break in to the business market through the back door, as it were) or Yuppie 2.0s who live in urbanized places like Seattle or New York where the wireless infrastructure already exists and where they can use it as a means of wealth signaling (http://www.slate.com/id/2181822/). Wireless-everything is cool, but with no option for wired Ethernet and such the potential for a solid college-student market as with the MacBook is pretty slim. And the lack of CD drive heavily implies that it's designed for use as a second computer, rather than a primary one.

That said, I may yet get one when we move to one of those urban centers and become Yuppie 2.0s...especially if the solid-state HDD ones come down in price.

[roseneko.livejournal.com]

Indeed. If the SSHD ones come down in price some over the next couple of years, I might have to seriously look into getting one once we move someplace with actual wireless infrastructure.

[tygenco-x.livejournal.com]

"However, I am a computer geek"

So you're running Linux, right? 'cause Suse and Tux are sweet.

[bkleber.livejournal.com]

Ooh..... lossless audio.... don't make me drool at work, they already think I'm odd because of the full-size pirate flag.

I'm a die-hard Mac-user, but keep a sense of cynicism about it. So did someone else, who made this:

[roseneko.livejournal.com]

That's pretty hilarious. I wouldn't say I'm a die-hard Mac addict yet (the bits about announcements and message boards don't really describe me), but I've seen it happen before. And I have to admit, there's something to the rumours of Steve Jobs and his RDF - somehow, Apple seems to have caught on to the fact that making something functional or making something cool won't sell half as well as making something that's both functional and cool. If only some other companies would get that idea...