Where are we in quality versus price versus weight equation in the first quarter of 2008?
Well it depends who ‘we’ are, to some extent. If you are Windows person and you want a small computer to travel with, the IBM Thinkpad is probably a good thing. I wouldn’t know, being a Mac user, but then maybe someone could get interested in running OS X on a $2,500 IBM Thinkpad X300, weighing 1.4kg (3 lbs), as described HERE .
In the absence of that, the world is still split | Mac | Windows | and I like Mac.
Staying at home and working doesn’t really bring weight into the equation and I can devote my brain cells to thinking about price and quality when I make a buying decision. But I do travel and that brings in questions of whether I want to take my principal machine with me.
Knowing I can take my machine with me is nice though and the 15″ macbook pro weighs 2.45kg (5lbs) so it certainly is doable.
The latest version of the Macbook Pro 15″ comes in at $2,000 and has power and capability to satisfy most users, so there isn’t an awful lot of reason to think beyond that machine in terms of quality. Look HERE for details of the range.
So now the question becomes more difficult. If I don’t want to take my main machine with me wherever I go, what do I take? Enter the Macbook Air.
At 1.36kg (2.9lbs) it is certainly portable, but then is also doesn’t cost that much less than a Macbook Pro, so I could just buy another Macbook Pro, duplicate/sync all my stuff on both machines and take the older, slightly lesser spec machine with me in the knowledge that if something did go wrong when I was traveling, there is a duplicate at home.
Or, if money was tighter I could buy the non-Pro version of the Macbook, weighing in at 2.27kg (5lbs) for $1,100.
So who is the Macbook Air aimed at? Well I think it has to come down to what its makers seem to have decided its main selling point is, and that is weight. After all, it is called the Macbook Air.
So is the Macbook or the Macbook Pro too heavy to travel with and feel as free as a bird?
My travels tend to be big jumps and then stay there for months. In the last three years I have lived in three countries, and for good length of time in each. So putting the Macbook Pro in my hand luggage has not been a good test of its weight because the problem is infrequent.
When we first arrived where we are now, I was walking into town to Starbucks to join their network until we got high speed internet access at home, and that walk into town is when I started to notice the weight of the Macbook Pro. It is not that it feels tremendously heavy; it is that it makes carrying anything else substantial, rather more of a problem.
Of course it is all relative. Ten years ago the thought of having this amount of computing power in a package you can walk around with, was unthinkable.
But somewhere over the last year or so, there has been a paradigm shift in my thinking to the point where I think that more or less anything in terms of size, weight, capability, and price, is possible. And if not now, today, then very soon – maybe the end of this year or early next year – temptingly close anyway.
For the moment, the iPod Touch is the nearest thing to solving the problem of weight. But it is not a 13″ machine, and playing about with it in the store made me feel like Alice looking down the rabbit hole.
Which takes us back to the Macbook Air and the question: who is the Macbook Air aimed at?
Well it took my wife to point out that whereas I might put up with the weight of the Macbook Pro, if she were commuting, she would be very happy to have a machine that offered full size computing in a package that weighs half of what a Macbook or a Macbook Pro weighs.
Perhaps they should call it the Macbook Commute?
