Great Expectations

I turned to Merrystar tonight and told her about the latest entry in the Mac laptop line, the MacBook Air.

Her: How is it?

Me: Meh, skip it.

Her: <raises eyebrow>

Me: Get the new Toughbook instead, and travel with your iPhone.

Aside from the ability to run OSX, the MBAir is just not as good as the Panasonic W7, let alone the R8.. For pity’s sake, it’s a full pound heavier than the R8! Solid-state drive or not, that’s ludicrous!

I fully recognize that four years next to a Toughbook W2 has spoiled me. It is a fantastic computer. It is the polar opposite of my airplane wing; light, discrete, but not fragile.

(In other words, perfectly suited to its user.)

I also recognize that I could be falling into the feature comparison trap, so often seen with the iPhone. Simply comparing features often misses so much of the user experience that makes a device better to use. Maybe I’m missing that part of the MacBook Air’s appeal, where the multi-touch trackpad, combined with OS X, improves the laptop experience so much that it blows away other laptops, much like the iPhone blew away other phones. But I don’t think I am.

The Toughbook W series is seriously well designed. It’s sexy, it’s light, it’s tough as nails, it has all the normal ports, it has an optical drive… and it comes with three years of service, standard. The AirBook is sexier, skinny, and.. er, runs OSX. That’s it.

I had hoped that I’d be able to welcome the coming of the Apple subnotebook with something close to the excitement of the iPhone. And maybe this is a device that you have to see in person to truly appreciate — I hope that it is.

But for a personal purchase, I’ll skip the MacBook Air and move to a plain old MacBook when the time comes to retire my current rig.

Meh.

Update 1/19/2008: I wrote a follow up to this piece, particularly on why the MacBook Air is decidedly not the right computer for Merrystar. After watching the videos on Apple’s site, however, I’m not as certain that it’s not the right computer for me.

I should probably avoid seeing one of these in person for a few months, eh?