Improving the MacBook Air
I previously railed against the newly announced MacBook Air, and with good reason: too high of a price point and lack of anything that sets it as a pro machine. The MacBook Air is a great concept, but the shipping product in my mind doesn’t line up with a finished one.
The Price!
In most cases, a price reduction either signals a sale or lacking something compared to their more expensive counterparts. Apple did the exact opposite with the MacBook Air; well, they did make it really freaking thin, I’ll give them that. But on the other hand, the specs are horrible for the outrageous price Apple slapped on. For $200 I can sacrifice a thin form factor and gain a beast of a machine, one that would eat the Air for breakfast and demand some puny Vaio for seconds. Even then I can save a couple hundred dollars and get a baseline MacBook with comparable specs.
Obviously this isn’t the Mac for everyone, which is what I think as well. To make it work, the price should be lower than the baseline MacBook or at least the same.
The Specs!
Short of changing the price, what could Apple have done better? A ultra portable has been in demand for a while, and some thought Apple delivered on that with the Air, but before that the PowerBook of old was dominant. Once that line was scrapped and replaced by the MacBook/Pro, the demise of the lower end 12-inch PowerBook was lamented by many road warriors. It was a great machine that took everything great about its bulkier brethren and put it in a small package. Power, storage, processing, it was all there.
Why Apple couldn’t have shrunken down the 15-inch MacBook Pro into a 12-inch form factor sort of seems absurd, but heat output gets to be tricky in laptops. Surely that shouldn’t have been a problem for Apple, as they managed to get a custom made chip from Intel specifically for the MacBook Air. Why couldn’t they have used the newly available Penrynn chips to offer the same power of the pro in a smaller size? For the same price point that it is now, the Air could’ve been the perfect blend of power and portability if it was offered in a 12-inch form factor. It seems to me that the main problems with the MacBook Air are confusion as a Pro machine priced laptop while under spec’d, and its high price for a limited function portable.
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Comments
I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if the main buyers of the MBA are women. I’ve noticed over the years that women tend to value size, weight, and portability over everything and that includes performance and screen resolution. Men tend to have the belief that bigger is better and would trend towards the 17” MBP rather than the lightweight MBA. The women in our office almost all have tiny ultra-portables weighing three pounds or less while not a single man in our office has one. In fact some of the men in the office have huge 10+ pound Windows laptops with 17” screens. On of the primary requirements of the women are that the laptop must fit in their shoulder bags.
The only problem I see with the MBA and its target audience is that it might be TOO big. Being only marginally smaller in dimensions than the MacBook, its weight and coolness factor may not be a good enough incentive. I think this is where Steve missed the mark. He’s a guy so he made the choice of the bigger screen, not realizing that his target market considers that way down the list of priorities for the ultra-portable market. My wife, who is seriously considering a MBA made that comment to me that it’s probably too big and that soured it in her eyes.
Okay, Tanner let’s not say Ferrari. Let’s say the much much cheaper Mazda RX-8. Same point holds.
Apple is trying to hit market-differentiated segments here. You are unhappy with the MBA because it doesn’t hit the product space you wished it did.
The product space you should compare the MBA to is the one for lightweight (3 lbs and under) laptops. Then the MBA doesn’t fare too badly price-wise and feature-wise. Yes, they picked a different compromise than Sony or Toshiba, they gave up a drive and ports in favor of ergonomics and processing power. We’ll see if the buying public chooses their set of compromises.
You can pan the product if you think it pales against the other lightweights out there. You can pan the product if you think this is a market segment that Apple is foolish to get into. But to pan the product because it isn’t more like a MB or MBP or even the 4+ lb 12” PowerBook is, yes, missing the point by a mile.
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