If You Want a MacBook Air Just Buy a MacBookAir
I’m a gadget nut, so I read a lot of tech articles. And a lot of those are stupid. Behold — the stupidest tech article I’ve read in ages.
SAI is a site I admire, but sometimes the things they’ll do for clickthroughs…
Anyway, the article is headlined “The Best Super-Slim Laptop Alternatives If You Don’t Have The Loot To Spend On A MacBook Air.” If I ever decide to buy another laptop, it will definitely be something in the MacBook Air class — super-thin, super-light, and SSD-driven. So what contenders did SAI find? Here they are:
•ASUS UX21. The price is nice — $799. But it doesn’t exist. Not yet, anyway. And that’s the “expected” “starting” price. How will it stack up in real life? Nobody knows.
•Acer Aspire 3951. It looks very nice. You also can’t buy one, not even for the “under $800″ that SAI is “hearing about.”
•Lenovo ThinkPad X1. The starting price is the same as the 13-inch MacBook Air — $1299. So, it doesn’t quite qualify as cheaper. Especially since an 11-inch Air can be had for $999. But it has a hard drive, weighs nearly four pounds (over a third more), has a slower processor, and a lower-resolution screen. This isn’t an Air competitor in any way, shape, or form.
•Samsung Series 9. This is one hot-looking laptop, and it shares the same price as the 13-inch Air and the Lenovo. Size, weight, SSD, and battery life are all competitive, too. However, the Samsung has a slower processor and a lower-resolution screen. Apple will give you slightly more for your money. And again, this is at the top end of the Air price scale.
•Sony VAIO Z. Starts at $2,000. I have no idea what this machine is doing in a price competition.
•Toshiba Portege R835. I couldn’t find this one on Toshiba’s own web site to do a real comparison. But since it sports a hard drive and weighs over three pounds (and has the lower-quality screen and slower CPU), this is another one that just isn’t in the same class as the Air and the Samsung.
And that’s the whole list — two vaporware products, two standard laptops, a $2,000 behemoth, and a very nice Samsung unit that shares a starting price with the most-expensive MacBook Air.
I’ll have whatever SAI‘s Kenneth Butler is drinking. But make mine a single, because Kenneth is in a whole ‘nother from mine.
UPDATE: It wasn’t easy, but I managed to figure out how to upgrade the Lenovo to the same processor, Bluetooth (not included???) and SSD as the MacBook Air. Price: $1,944, with “savings.” You still get a worse screen, though, and an extra pound to carry.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Samsung also makes an 11.6″ model to compete with Apple’s tiniest Air — and starting at the same $999, too. It’s heavier and has a much slower processor for the price, but the screen is competitive, the SSD is the same and the battery life is advertised as longer.
No mention of the fact that one must run windows on the silly things? I for one would happily pay a significant premium to avoid that. If I had to. Which I don’t.
Well, technically I bet any of those could run OSX with some fiddling around.
But the Air still has the advantage of shipping with it and running it with no fiddling, and with full support.
Remember Apple’s competitive advantage – they help suppliers start up production lines of new technologies for exclusivity and the lower prices in the future. The same component might cost Lenovo $120, and Apple pays $60. Good place to be.
Does the Air run Windows? That would make it useful.
Sure. You can run Win7 in a virtual machine or boot directly using Boot Camp. A bit like putting Kia four-banger in your Benz — but tastes differ.
Sadly, there are still many Windoze apps that we need to run. I’ve got Linux on my main machine, but I’m pretty sure that my next laptop will be an Air. The main feature I’ll miss is Lenovo’s TrackPoint, which can run rings around any touchpad for high-accuracy pointing and clicking (even for apps like Photoshop and Illustrator it’s 90% as good as a mouse, at least for me). But ThinkPad’s just aren’t what they used to be, so it looks like Apple, here I come… I’ll probably need a bigger, third party SSD though (apparently these are being made for the Air).
Other World Computing is where I get most of my upgrades. They have a great selection of SSDs. After the next round of price breaks, I’m planning on making one the boot drive on my Mac Pro desktop.
Yeah, my idea of productivity software has to do numerical solutions to N-dimensional differential equations. Sadly, it won’t run on Mac. Anyway, I would miss the TrackPoint terribly–with a touchpad I’m always clicking on something accidentally while trying to touch-type, and with the TrackPoint I don’t have to remove my hands from the touch-typing position in order to move the cursor.
The latest Thinkpads have awesome keyboards, and the 3-year warranty service is still provided by IBM, so it’s a great choice for a work PC.
For those who do pine for Windows, it screams on mac hardware. I’m no great fan of the Apple way of controlling everything; everytime I try to do anything with my iPhone, I feel manacled. My next phone will be Android.
But Apple’s hardware is absolutely killer.
Maybe I can bitch here because it turns out I need an iPad or iPhone to run iBooks, the only epub reader that will open my Starbucks Pick of the Week iTunes download. There I was at midnight last night, cuddling my MacBook and salivating to read the large excerpt from The Night Circus, and I wound up in one.
I totally agree with this. Apple makes fantastic hardware, but I’m much happier with the wide open ecosystems in Linux and Windows environments.
It looks like the Toshiba’s been refreshed…