Apple releases 11.6" Instant-On MacBook Air for $999 | Hacker News Reader

Apple releases 11.6" Instant-On MacBook Air for $999

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63 pointsvlad144 comments

I love the little dongle that it comes with as a "software reinstall" -- http://i.imgur.com/Hj8zt.png

Looks like USB without the box around the contacts.

But with rounded contacts! You know somewhere they had a meeting about how rectangular contacts would be off-brand.

Which have been available for years I would add. I had a white plastic one (without the hole in the back) in 2006. Just saying, as with most things Apple, it's not a massive innovation.

It's about time they sold something like that. I haven't used my optical drive for anything except the OS X installation and recovery disk.

I'm assuming that this means that target disk mode now works with USB again.

Did the target disk mode ever work with USB? I’m also not sure whether that means anything, I think you have been able to boot from a plethora of devices including USB sticks for ages. Target disk mode for USB sure would be nice, though.

I may be remembering incorrectly, but I thought booting worked from USB, then Apple removed that option for some reason, probably technical, and now it looks like it came back.

My 2007 iMac boots from USB - in fact, since its internal drive died it's running permanently from an external drive. PowerPC Macs couldn't boot from USB (but could from FireWire), but as far as I'm aware all Intel Macs can.

Target Disk Mode is something else, and wouldn't really work over USB since it has a host/device model which FireWire doesn't.

Wonder if Lion will come on a USB dongle instead of a DVD.

I wonder if Ubuntu could do something similar

I've had a MacBook Air since the day it originally came out, and it's been my favorite computer ever. This addresses all of my issues with it. As long as you don't need extreme computing power, you should get one. It's one of those cases where being twice as portable makes it ten times as useful.

The things that I always weigh first in hardware are screen res and disk i/o. For the type of work I do, I always rank CPU third (I used to evaluate hardware based on my ability to run VMs, but these days I find myself renting on-demand EC2 instances instead).

I've been mighty disappointed by Apple laptop screen res prior to the latest generation of MBP's, but I have to admit, these new models impress me, and I've generally been quite dismissive of the Air line.

I was recently entertaining the thought of replacing my 13" Macbook with a 15" MBP, but as it is, my full briefcase including a Macbook is already a shoulder killer.

Given the evolution of my own use cases, I think I'd actually consider one of these guys as my next notebook.

I tried MacBook Air and Envy 133 earlier, but I change to Thinkpad X301 and must say that other than very great OSX (use Linux so does not matter so much) I prefer Thinkpad now.

The one thing that I dislike about the latest small form factor ThinkPads is the USB docking stations. The older Thinkpads had one of those bottom mount docking stations.

Mac users might dismiss docking stations, but they are --so-- handy if you're constantly moving around.

My x200 12" appears to have the docking port on the bottom.

Interesting.

IIRC, the X301 dropped the bottom dock connector. One guy I know spent hours with support trying to get the USB dock to work. He ended up not using the dock. The dock on his previous X-series worked like a charm.

X201 has also dock port.

I guess x300/x301 were only models without dock and the reaction to that was not that positive.

FWIW the X301 has since been discontinued, w/ the T410s being the closest equivalent.

Does yours overheat? Mine did. Except for that it's close to ideal.

(I managed to fix the overheating with http://coolbook.se, at least most of the time. It still overheats if I watch video for more than about 10 min.)

My MBA had lots of heat issues initially. When having a Skype call from waterpipe cafe terrace in Istanbul the Air would shut down when sun started shining.

However, the Apple firmware update from autumn 2008 fixed most of that, and things were even better after I disabled Spotlight. Now I'm running Ubuntu on this and it doesn't get too hot to keep on lap any longer.

>As long as you don't need extreme computing power

e.g. as long as you don't want to play a 720p flash video, say something off of Hulu

Or has adobe finally started supporting hardware accelerated video on OSX?

The current version of Flash 10.1 supports hardware accelerated video with the graphics card in the new MacBook Airs.

I have owned 3 Macbook Airs. Two first-gen ones broke down too often, the second-gen one Apple gave to me for free.

Most people complained it's pricey. It puzzles me. Think of how many hours a day you spent touching it. A $2000 price-tag divided by 2 years, 10 hours a day, that's cheaper than your daily beer habit.

It is absolutely worth it to buy the best machine you can afford.

Especially if you are using that machine for work. I always buy the laptop with the nicest screen I can afford. That alone makes Macs price competitive with non-Macs.

I have to concur that MacBook screens are very nice (modulo your take on the glossiness). I bought a Thinkpad T410 w/ a high-res screen and I must say that I'm disappointed w/ the poor viewing angles compared to the MacBook screens. Longer term I'm planning on buying a Dell IPS "Ultrasharp" LCD to hook up to the Thinkpad, but it wouldn't be as necessary w/ the MacBooks.

The weakness up until recently with Mac screens has been the res. I actually didn't buy a 15" Macbook Pro because it didn't have 1680x1050 when I was in the market. I figured if I was going to be annoyed by 1440x900 at 15", I may as well be annoyed and save a bundle by going with a lowly Macbook.

1440x900 on a 13", however, makes things interesting. My next purchase was going to be a 15" Macbook with the 1680 screen. Now, I'm not so sure. I think my shoulder prefers that I carry a lighter load in my bag.

  > It is absolutely worth it to buy the best machine
  > you can afford.

I'm assuming that most people that are complaining about price don't have huge wallets.

I am a poor student myself : )

To me it's actually cheaper this way. As absolute price never matters as long as you can pay it upfront. Then the long term cost per usage-time will pays off (plus better usage experience).

The same philosophy applies to shoes, furniture and other daily items.

Absolute price matters when you're paying cash. Not so much when you're doing it on credit.

If you're paying on credit, you also have to factor in the interest... It's no long just about the up-front cost.

If you're paying on credit, you're not paying up front.

It's not the best machine you can afford though for a lot of people. I have a X200 thinkpad at 12" which is 600 grams more than the 11" and 300 grams more than the 13". But it has a dual core i5 at 2.5 gigahertz which is a fair bit faster than low clocked cpus of a generation that was released in 2006, 4 gigs of ram (rather than 2) and an Intel 80gig SSD running Ubuntu 10.10. The battery is 7 to 11 hours. With their batteries in it it'd be even lighter than it is, most of the difference is right there. It already has an app store with nearly a 100/0 free/paid split (I think I've heard there are paid apps in there somewhere). It cost $1150 or so with the SSD as an extra $200 (but I have a 500gig external drive now too). It's the classic very attractive "they use these on the space station" thinkpad case, well designed with water-spill catching design et cetera.

So yes, the macbook is a good machine. But for people who aren't developing for OSX and still want well designed hardware it's hard to argue there aren't other options that are easily better if you can handle 300 grams of extra weight. And yes, I've had macbooks fail on me (case cracking and hdd failure within one year) so I think they are probably average quality in that regard (i.e. the internals don't match their good looks and are possibly compromised by them sometimes).

The MacBook Air's Geforce 320M is a significantly better GPU than anything Intel has shipped.

Ah ok. My usage is business and development so I suppose the cpu matters much more to me, as do open source reliable drivers. I see the point for a fast GPU for entertainment usage, but going all the way down to a 1.4 gighz core 2 duo seems like it would cancel out a lot of the gaming potential that the GPU gains.

Gaming's not the only advantage that a Geforce chip has over Intel's graphics, since the NVidia chip supports GPGPU. Used properly, OpenCL could make up for the slow CPU for things like Photoshop effects and video editing. It's a tradeoff that's highly dependent on what kind of software you want to run.

Fully agreed, the portability is simply amazing. And unlike my iPad I can actually use this for development work anywhere.

That said, I'm a bit disappointed about the battery life estimates on the new MBAs. The lease on my old Air will run out in spring and now the contest will be between the 11" and the 13". Though I'm also waiting to see if Nokia ever does a refresh of their Booklet that had integrated 3G and 10h battery

Sub 13" != netbook Remember, we had sub 13" laptops (we called them sub notebooks or ultraportables or something) before netbooks came out. Recall the confusion when netbooks first came out. In fact, the original netbooks weren't even close to 11.6" large. 11.6/12" was solely the domain of subnotebooks until the ~3rd generation of netbooks (amazing how quickly they pumped those out).

So stop comparing this to netbooks. Compare them to Thinkpad X series and other non-Atom powered sub 13" laptops. Hell, compare it to the Alienware M11z if you want. Even that's a more accurate comparison than netbooks.

My MBP is already 'instant-on'. Open the case and one second later it's awake and ready to go. I'll never understand why people feel the need to shut down their computer after every use.

Lots of people are newcomers to the Mac. Windows uptimes (edit: especially in the workplace) are usually measured in hours. Unix uptimes are usually measured in months.

Also: you see the screen go dark, versus wait for the throbber after you close your machine, and people choose the finality.

no, they are not (uptimes measured in hours), on windows laptops hibernation has been working fine in windows for a few years. I don't know of any unix different from osx for which the same applies.

Servers and desktop are not really the point of discussion here.

If I remember correctly, Jobs said this thing had thirty days of standby time.

My MBP does not feature instant-on after twenty days.

An honest question... How many people go days without using their computer these days?

I'm one who never turns my MBP off. There are a few times I can think of when it hasn't been used at least once/day, even on vacation. It seems like if you are the kind of person who needs/appreciates instant on, it's because you make regular use of your machine. This would seem to counter the need to have it sleep for a month. If you can go that long between regular uses, you can probably wait an extra 3 minutes for bootup.

My laptop isn't my main computer, so there are quite a few times where I would leave it in standby/sleep mode for even a week at a time before I notice it blinking it's orange LED to remind me to plug it back in...

An 11" Air would not be my main computer, and as such I wouldn't necessarily be using it every day. I can easily see it sitting unused for days at a time while I use some of my other computers. But when I do want it I'll still really appreciate having it not being dead because it sat in my briefcase for a week.

If you're not a professional coder or writer -- or if you use a different, "work" computer for that -- and/or you've got an iPad and an iPhone, going for days without using your machine is not a farfetched scenario.

But, beyond that: I might use my computer every few days and yet not want to have to plug it in every few days.

I would think that the point is that it's virtually losing no battery time while in sleep mode. So, if you have 5 hours of battery life fully charged when you leave the house, that really means 5 hours of the computer on, even if you use it 2 hours in the morning, let it sleep the whole day, and use it 3 hours at night.

I also never turn my MacBook off, and can use it during my commute both ways without having to charge it at work. But I'm pretty sure that tonight it will have visibly less capacity than when I finished this morning.

Sometimes, it also dies while sleeping. It sound that it wouldn't happen as much with the Air.

Overall, I already feel that my MacBook is instant-on; this is icing on the cake.

We've accidentally killed two MacBook batteries after going on vacation for a week. We now make sure to shut machines down before going, but it can be a bit of an expensive mistake if you just close the lid in the usual way.

So don't think of it as 30 days of standby sleep mode. Think of it as infinite standby sleep mode. After all, if you never use anywhere near 30 days of standby there's no practical difference to you.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but this is what Steve is referring to. 30 days of standby effectively makes awake from sleep the same as on, whereas before you had a fast drain during even sleep.

I wouldn't call several days or almost a week of standby with a healthy battery a "fast drain". Nobody on HN leaves their computer sleeping for more than few hours anyway, right?

The '30 days of standby' figure assumes that you let your Air go into hibernation, which has been supported by MacBooks for a long time, but only as a last resort when the battery gets low. The Air is apparently just more aggressive about using hibernation.

The underlying power management architecture (top-notch, admittedly) hasn't changed at all. Hibernation isn't any faster to restore than other MacBooks with a SSD. They've just made wake-from-sleep slightly faster on the new Air. Nice to have, but it doesn't seem as significant to me as Steve made it sound.

Are you sure about this? Hibernation generally refers to writing the contents of RAM to disk so that the computer can power off completely, if I'm not mistaken.

That's what Engadget is saying is necessary to hit the 30 days. It's still early and no one has had time to do a thorough review, but I don't get the impression that there's anything fundamentally different about the new Air's power management. They've just tightened up the response time and made the SSD standard, so hibernation is much faster.

Yeah, this feature seems like a non-event to me. It might be marginally faster.

Apparently standby lasts 30 days for the 13.3" model. Currently my MBP burns through the battery in standby within 1-2 days. With a 30-day standby time, I'd worry a lot less about having it plugged in all the time.

http://www.engadget.com/photos/apples-new-macbook-air/#34886...

any one else notice that the standby time on the Macbooks is substantially better than the pro's? I actually wish I had my old macbook just due to this reason. I could leave it on standby for a day or two and come back with a minimal drain on battery life.

Too many people are calling this thing overpriced, but remember that a 64GB iPad is $699. Then, in addition, you're getting a full OS, a stronger processor, a dedicated graphics chip, and this last one's dumb, but you're getting a keyboard too.

So I think pricing is spot-on for the 11" specs. If I replace my primary machine (a first-gen Macbook) with this, though, it would need to be the 13". The 11" seems like a secondary machine.

One question, though: isn't instant start-up trivial for a laptop?

Overpriced compared to what? A plastic netbook with a cheap screen?

The one thing you can't overlook is the onboard flash storage. That stuff still isn't as cheap as most of us would like.

> One question, though: isn't instant start-up trivial for a laptop?

Only when it's sleeping, not when it's hibernating. This would be "shut my Mac for two days, come back to instant-on."

The $999 model seems to come equipped with a 1.4 Ghz Core 2 Duo. Any ideas why they didn't use the newer i series CPUs? Don't they have better performance per watt?

I'm guessing it's to keep costs low.

The Core i3/i5/i7 are too hot to fit in the Air and have a sucky GPU. Note that it's possible to haver higher performance per watt and higher power at the same time.

This is kind of interesting to me as an owner of a couple older Minis: is Apple signalling that 10.7 will run fine on a lower end Core 2 Duo?

I would be shocked if 10.7's CPU requirements were anything more stringent than a 64-bit capable CPU (ie. Core 2 or later). There's a chance that they might drop support for low-end GPUs like then Intel GMA950, but it seems too soon for them to require an OpenCL-capable GPU, so they'll probably keep Intel graphics support around until they're ready to make that jump.

Yeah, 64bit and the graphics card will probably become more important. I was wondering why they went with the Nvidia card (which probably precluded using a Core i-series processor instead of the Core 2 Duo), but given the OpenCL emphasis, it makes sense. Hopefully Apple will allow some performance optimizations, like how they disabled the water-ripple effect of Dashboard on non-OpenGL video card computers when that came out.

Also, 2GB Ram and 64GB storage isn't something I could work with. Would need at least 4GB Ram and 256GB, but then I'd pay something like $1600 for a 13" notebook? I think the main problem about the MacBook Air and the previous one is that the MacBook Pro is a much more attractive deal.

The Air comes in at $1800 with 4GB ram and 2.13GHz cpu. Apple are charging $750 just for the 256 GB SSD upgrade on the 13 inch MacBook Pro, that's a crazy price for an SSD.

That's about a 33% premium. Unfortunately you can't go elsewhere because the SSD industry is packing SSDs in a ridiculous 2.5" form factor.

The industry needs to develop a standard size SSD for ultra-portables, especially one that Apple is likely to use in future devices.

The i3/5/7 laptop chips these days come with on-chip integrated graphics that is way below Apple's standards, and doesn't support OpenCL. Apple really wants all of their machines to support OpenCL on the graphics chip. In order to get this, they need to use an NVidia graphics chip.

For the Core 2 generation CPUs, NVidia produces a chipset with one of their GPUs integrated. For the i3/5/7 generation, Intel refused to let NVidia make chipsets. In order for Apple to get NVidia graphics in a laptop with an i3/5/7, they have to have the i3/5/7 CPU, an Intel chipset, and an NVidia graphics chip. The necessity of using 3 big, hot chips instead of two increases the parts costs, slightly increases the power consumption, makes cooling and motherboard design more complicated, and, in the case of the MacBook Air, they pretty much don't fit unless you make the machine thicker or use a smaller battery.

Until Intel can produce a decent graphics core or they decide to play nice with NVidia, ultraportables have to decide whether to have good graphics or the latest CPUs. (If, however, AMD's upcoming mobile Fusion parts end up being as fast or faster than the Core 2, this will change significantly.)

So, the apple version of my netbook costs $1k. Wow. Apple makes gorgeous, intuitive products, but... Wow.

I bought an Asus Aspire 1. I put in 2GB of RAM($40), Installed a OCZ SSD ($160), and bought a 9 cell battery for it($55), and put Windows 7 Ultimate on it (TRIM support for SSD's and free with a BizSpark subscription).

I now have a machine a bit thicker than an iPad that runs a full version of Windows 7 Ultimate, has a 14 hour battery life, and an extra battery with 10 hours on it. It's "Instant On" because I never turn it off, it just hibernates, and the SSD I'm using is crazy fast and sips battery juice through a cocktail straw. All for a bit more than $500.

Oh, did I mention that I can replace the memory, battery and Hard Drive without voiding my warranty?

I understand the appeal of a MacBook Air. I do. But the appeal of beautiful design, a glowing logo rules telling me to keep my hands off my own hardware... It's just not work the extra $500 for me.

Why the price of Windows was not in calculation? Did you also get aluminum unibody, full-size backlit keyboard, camera, multitouch trackpad? By the way, I am curious is Windows wake from sleep as instant as it is on OS X?

When you go back to using non Apple hardware the keyboard and touchpads are generally very bad. Bearing in mind the time spent using the keyboard and mouse having a good one makes the difference.

Even more important, the screens. Apples have historically had very good screens.

I look back at one of my older Windows laptops, which had exquisite res (1680x1050) and maybe cost me $1600. When I compare it to any of my Apple devices (even the low end ones), the screen is so horrible that I don't even know how I was able to work on it day in, day out.

It's fast enough. But it can be flaky/unreliable on no-name hardware.

Small != Netbook

I don't think many people consider the Thinkpad X series to be netbooks either.

But the apple version is not your netbook. I've owned Acer Aspire's and they are cheap and shoddy plastic units that start falling apart after only a few months of use. And the keyboard is all wrong. I picked up a 13" Macbook when I started wearing through the keys on Acer, and I don't think that was wasted money.

Since when did your Atom become the same thing as a C2D ULV? They aren't even in the same class. Nearly every subnotebook (yeah, the original name) using Intel ULVs runs over 800 dollars. The difference in processors (seriously, a C2D ULV will absolutely smoke an Atom) and graphics card (320M will leave whatever crap Intel packages with the Atoms now standing still) makes up a large part of the price difference.

I really wish windows had a really good trackpad with similar gestures to a macbook. I think that's one of the main features that's holding me off from buying windows netbooks. It really annoys me when I'm using the trackpad. It's hard to scroll around and navigate around in windows (without a mouse).

Don't get me wrong - I use windows all the time. It's just the lack of an easy to use trackpad irritates me a bit..

The only concern I see is pixel density. This is great for people like me with great eyesight, but I know my dad hates using my MacBook Pro 17" because I have the higher resolution screen option with greater pixel density.

OS X needs to support pixel density independency for these screens to be usable for those with less than perfect eyesight.

I was expecting resolution independence to be part of today's announcement. No dice.

Resolution independence really is going to become a necessary feature in the next year or so, especially given the pixel density on the iPhone 4.

I'd like a little notebook like this new Macbook Air, it would fits my needs for a thin portable client to replace my actual macbook (I ssh a lot to remote workstation when I need horsepower, coding and so on).

Still something puzzles me:

* No Ethernet. I really can't trust Airport, i have a 13" Macbook and sometimes Airport fails hard (without mentioning the speed transfer).

* No upgradable. I understand the design choices behind this nice netbook (or whatever), but what if the ssd breaks? Or the ram? I'd need to buy a new one.

Maybe my needs would be better fitted by a standard netbook. The truth I am ashamed to confess is that I am too confortable with OSX.

I think people should definitely invest a few extra bucks on Applecare with this model.

Absolutely but... hell it's +250 bucks!

Spread that cost over 3 years, and it's not that expensive. If you're buying a notebook that you intend to use for work or move around constantly, you have to budget that cost in.

Even if I was buying a Thinkpad X series for work, I'd invest in the extended warranty.

Now they need to just un-taper it, and fill the resulting space completely with battery. 40hr battery life MacBook.

Interesting idea. They certainly could stick a lot more battery in there if they un-tapered it.

The taper gets your typing angle right (I am guessing).

Good point. However, I don't recall Steve or any text on the Apple website that outright says that it is tapered for economics reasons. In this Stevenote and the previous Stevenotes where the MacBook Air was discussed it came across as if the the taper was there so they have another number to brag about when talking about thinness. That was my impression at least.

Wow, an official Mac OS X reinstall USB key:

http://images.apple.com/macbookair/images/specs_flashdrive_2...

hdd versions discontinued... future is here

one of the first things i noticed too. 2 years ago it was $1600 for an 80gb macbook air. time flies.

Arg! Apple, when are you going to add the i5 to your 13" MacBook Pro for me?

When the i5 has a decent GPU.

Looks very nice, but two things keep it from being a contender for my next portable purchase:

1. Glossy screen. That's a show-stopper. The whole point of a portable for me is that it is usable wherever I am, not that I can take it to where it might be usable.

2. Price. $999 is not that bad for what you get, but it pales in absolute terms to current netbook prices. And said netbooks are available with matte screens. They also usually have 3 USB ports (though I seldom use more than 2).

Still and all, very nice.

Kind of pissed that if I want the 2.13 ghz processor, I have to buy the 256 gb storage version. Otherwise I'd have already ordered.

I'm kinda curious. Does anyone know if that extra .27 ghz translate to a big difference in real world use?

I get your point, its just I want the fastest processor. But not with the biggest storage.

Actually I wasn't really making a point. I am genuinely curious what the performance difference is.

Ah, well from experience, I'd suggest its barely noticeable.

Hmm. So that's the price of an iPad with a keyboard and USB port.

"Remember when I said that netbooks aren't good at anything and they're just cheap laptops?"

http://i.imgur.com/51f9p.jpg

And it only weights 2.3lbs. Wow.

wait, I thought Jobs said that netbooks sucked and he refused to make one?

It's not really a netbook. It a full-fledged laptop, but minified. It has a good CPU, good GPU and plenty of disk space.

It's a subnotebook.

> It has a good CPU.

Compared to my TI calculator, maybe.

Or compared to an Intel Atom, which is the typical processor for netbooks.

$500 netbooks.

One thing is for sure... he hates 7" tablets

So I guess we should wait a year and expect to see a 7.9" tablet?

Until Apple releases one, but it's not just a 7" tablet, it's a the full-fledged 9" ipad, but minified.

The existing netbook niche is dominated by low-end components. The idea is: low cost, low performing computers that don't do much more than run a browser.

However, there has always been a huge gap in the netbook market for a premium netbook line. Not a dime-store almost-laptop but rather a slimmed down efficient laptop, filled with quality components. High performance SSD (better than spinning drives in every respect except total capacity), elided components that aren't used often such as the DVD drive, network ports, PC Card adapter slots, maybe even usb ports, overall smaller and lighter form factor, etc. The end result of that evolution is a sub-notebook or a premium netbook, capable of running more than just a browser but unburdened of all the clunky kitchen-sink bits of bigger laptops.

I think Jobs objected to the first category of products, and I'm inclined to say that this new batch of Macbooks doesn't fit that product category well.

> However, there has always been a huge gap in the netbook market for a premium netbook line.

Which has been filled quite nicely by the Thinkpad X series.

On the target page it says $1499...?

hit reload...

For the record, I had (and anyway, I had never visited this page, so it was not a local cache problem).

No 3G sim card support means instant fail. Seriously, this is a no-brainer feature.

Would you care to back your prognostication by short-selling AAPL?

No. Just because I think this is fail doesn't mean I'm bearish on the stock.

I'm as much of an Apple fanboy as anyone else (I use a MacBook Pro, Cinema Display, iPhone, etc. I've been using a MacBook Pro since 2003), but I'm not going to give them a free pass on a necessary feature in an ultra-portable laptop.

Well your fault for using an iPhone, just get a Froyo device and make your own WiFi around you!

Or, your fault for being an American! You can tether your iPhone in other countries.

Well, at least you can get a MyFi.

You can tether the iPhone in the USA as well. You just have to pay AT&T for the privilege.

We'll see how expensive the tethering is after we have carrier-vs-carrier competition for the iPhone in the USA.

They probably couldn't get carriers to agree to a iPad-like 3g plan for a laptop.

Do they even have to get carrier permission to include a sim card slot for GSM systems?

The only reason I can see them leaving this out is because unsuspecting users will end up with a horrible user experience when they get their first month's bill at the end of the month.

Apple would have to create a user interface to protect users from themselves by blocking a lot of unnecessary inbound and outbound network access when on 3G and also showing them how much of their monthly bandwidth they have used so far.

I'm with ya, and I don't think they'd need 'permission'... but usually Apple announces a deal to go along with stuff like that, you know, $15/month 3g plans on iPads.

Basically what I'm saying is that the carriers will be super pissed if all the sudden all of their users are using all of their purchased bandwidth because they can shove a card into their laptop. It's like ketchup, the majority of people don't use all 500mb/1gb/whatever of data per month, but they still pay for it. The telecoms want to keep it that way.

True. True.

However something tells me Steve doesn't care what the carriers think or feel. I know I don't care what they think.

In fact, putting more stress on the digital networks may give the carriers in the U.S. the ammunition they need to get the FCC to let them abandon POTS. The truth is that money going to support legacy POTS is taking money away from digital network investment. The FCC should allow common carriers to abandon POTS on the condition that all that money get poured back into digital network bandwidth and rural network expansion.

"I'm not going to give them a free pass on a necessary feature in an ultra-portable laptop."

Everyone's use case is different. 3G is not even close to being what I would consider a "necessary" feature. I'm way more disappointed that there's no built-in gigabit ethernet, as I'm generally required to plug in when on-site at a client. The dongle helps, but dongles suck.

The least they could do is treat the MacBook Air the same way they treat the iPad. They should offer two versions: one with 3G and one without.

Apple products tend to have a very opinionated design.

They were probably of the opinion that the current market for 3G enabled MBA's was too small to justify adding space to the device's internals and having another SKU.

I'm with you on this one. If I had shorted AAPL because I thought that AppleTV wasn't going anywhere... That would have been an epic investment FAIL, to use your term :-D

Why did this get downvoted? This is a machine meant for portability. Not everywhere has WiFi and when you take into account all the different wifi accounts (like boingo which is impossible to cancel), you end up paying a good portion of what could have been spent on 3G service.

Also, not every country is like the US where wifi is ubiquitous.

I didn't downvote you, so I can only offer a guess. It could be that your particular wording came across a little abrasively, so some people may have felt that while the subject was interesting, the tone of the comment might discourage open discussion and instead lead towards heated and personal flame exchanges.

Compare and contrast to:

Odd that there's no 3G sim card support, this is a machine meant for portability and touted as what happens when a Macbook hooks up with an iPad... Which has 3G as an option.

Thanks for the explanation.

Do other Apple notebooks have 3G? They are meant for portability too. It does have USB port. Get some 3G modem, problem solved (not being in US I just use my iPhone tethering with 1st gen Macbook Air for this).

Buying a separate data plan for your laptop is a no-brainer? I've already paid for 3G data; I'm not paying again.

As more and more devices come with 3G built-in, market forces would dictate that the supply side will change to meet this additional demand.

One possibility is that more network will be built out so that people can have more than one 3G plan for the price of one 3G plan today.

A) Use a USB 3G Dongle, or

B) Use a MiFi over WiFi.

The MiFi has the additional advantage of being able to network your iPod Touch, iPad, Kindle, and Laptop all at the same time.

Plugging in a USB 3G Dongle all the time or carrying around a MiFi kind of defeats the purpose of having a laptop as small and portable as the Macbook Air, doesn't it?

For me, anything that is constantly plugged into the USB is an inconvenience. That's why Bluetooth was invented. USB and Firewire are good for the occasional connection.

Nah. Outside the US, you can tether a laptop to an iPhone. You might want an iPad to be the only device you have to carry, but with a laptop, it's not unreasonable to also carry a phone. Why duplicate the hardware and the dataplan? Even inside the US, there are other ways to connect to a cellular network. Sim card support might actually be a useful feature, but it's far from a no-brainer.

With tethering you don't get "instant on" internet.

You have to make sure your laptop is connected to the phone and that the phone is connected to the internet. The ideal solution is one where the laptop can connect to the internet as soon as you open the lid.

If your battery (on both devices) can handle it, bluetooth 'tethering' (the term getting increasingly inaccurate) is a good compromise.

On the iPhone, you can leave it turned on and it only activates when requested. Turning it on is as simple as selecting 'connect' from the bluetooth icon in the menu bar.

You probably wouldn't want on-board 3G to connect automatically anyway (for cost reasons if nothing else), so it's not much more work.

But the down side is that leaving bluetooth on will affect battery life on the phone and laptop. Everything's a compromise.

But will it support more than one user account/profile? That's easily the biggest complaint I have about the iPad.

Why wouldn't it? It's OS X.

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