MacBook AirYesterday was Steve Jobs’ big presentation at the annual Macworld conference where Apple shows off its new toys. This one might as well bear the Fisher-Price logo. MacBook Air follows Apple’s typical format, a sealed box of overpriced and underpowered tech that’ll need to be sent back to Apple in a couple of years for critical battery replacement.

The size is impressive. In true showman style, Jobs pulled the MacBook Air from a manila envelope to illustrate its thickness of less than one inch.

The base model costs $1,899 for a 2GB memory, 1.6 GHz core 2 duo processor and 80GB of storage on a micro hard drive. 

Apple can really make mechanical, micro-hard drives pretty small these days. Mechanical drives are so 2004: When is Apple going to get with the 21^st Century and fully embrace flash storage?

In his presentation, Jobs refers to MacBook Air as a wireless device. Indeed, it does have some nice communication features stacked with the next generation 802.11n Wi-Fi protocol and Bluetooth. This more than compensates for Air’s lack of optical storage. I applaud Apple for taking a risk to envision notebooks without a DVD drive.

What about 3G? A truly connected device marketed for on-the-go communication should have the ability to connect to ultra-fast mobile networks. Now that Apple has teamed with AT&T for iPhone, an optional MacBook Air 3G plan should have been easy and valuable to anyone trying to perform business on the road.

But practical business application has never been Apple’s forte.

The Apple logo might as well read Fisher-Price

MacBook Air has the same old Achilles heel lovingly engineered into most Apple products. It’s a sealed vessel of one-shot technology. You can’t open it, so you can’t upgrade CPU, memory, or storage and you can’t even replace the battery when it goes bad.

That means in two to three years or approximately 500 charge cycles, whichever comes first, your $1800 toy is either headed to the junkyard or back to Apple for a costly battery replacement. Apple is surely banking on the former.

But take heart Apple faithful, your MacBook Air’s battery life is sure to get you through at least two more Macworlds. You have plenty of opportunity to learn what you need next to replace your new MacBook.

Editor’s note: Yes, there is an available 64GB flash option - $3,248 later. Why not just call it an even $5,000?

Tags: HTC

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 10:10 am and is filed under Portable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.