I have in my possession the new
Apple MacBook Air, "the world's thinnest notebook". Now I don't own it, I am merely sending it back to the manufacturers to be repaired as my cousin, the owner, is out of the country. He bought it in LA this week and when he was registering in the airport it stopped working...not a great start.
So a quick non-techie opinion on the pro's and con's of this much-vaunted MacBook Air are:
Pro's- It's super thin - really this machine is as thin as you could ever imagine a laptop being. Although I'm sure it won't be long before it is surpassed, probably by another Apple.
- Looks very cool - which make you look cool by default
- Powerful machine -2GB DDR SDRAM, 1.6GHz or 1.8GHz processor
- Adequate screen size - 13.3inch is plenty big for the average mobile user
- Keyboard lights up when its dark
- Extremely portable - the thing almost fits in an A4 envelope
Cons- 80 Gig hard drive - not that big these days so it wouldn't be long before you'd need an external drive or desktop to store your music, video and other multimedia.
- Limited connectivity - no ethernet connection to connect to LAN, with a wire. Have to get an adapter if you want to connect to one.
- No optical drive - i.e. no CD or DVD drive. If you want one you can pay extra and get an external drive, but this is Apple specific so it won't work with any other brand of PC or laptop.
- Only 1 USB port - could be messy if you wanted to use a memory stick and a mouse and maybe connect to a printer etc etc. You could always carry around a usb hub, but then you're starting to look like a pack horse and ultimately reducing its portability.
- Can't customise it while purchasing to add or remove capability, the way you could with say a Dell laptop.
- No connection for a projector - you'd have to pay extra for another adapter. See above!
- Relatively expensive - pound for pound or euro for euro it works out more expensive than others in the same range. Then again Macs usually are. You can get your hands on one for about £1150 or my cousin got his for about $1800...better value especially with the weak dollar.
Will any of these cons turn off an Apple user from going out and buying one...absolutely not. They're in the Apple cult and in fairness if I had a few quid to spare I'd probably get one too. It was great showing it off in college over the last few days.
Version 3 of the Mozilla Firefox web browser will be released here on June 17th, 2008. The company are trying to break the Guinness world record for the amount of software downloaded in one day. One of the new features is automatic warnings when you arrive at a webpage page which has malicious code. So as well as being even more secure, it will be interesting to see which sites are actually giving you all that junk spyware. It's also meant to be faster, more customisable and have a better bookmarking / toolbar system.
