Dell launches purported MacBook Air killer | Hacker News Reader

Dell launches purported MacBook Air killer

infoworld.com

6 pointssnydeq29 comments

I've seen very little evidence, based on Air sales, that it is popular enough to warrant killing.

Where do you get your sales info from? I've never seen sales numbers for the Air, and I'm curious to see what they're like.

Dell can't use this to compete with the Air. The Air's a luxury product - possibly the only real luxury laptop. It's for people who really, really, really like beautiful things that feel good, and who don't mind the fact that for that you're paying more than you would for a more powerful computer. Dell doesn't make luxury computers. I doubt they're skilled enough to make computers that work beautifully enough to deserve a luxury. Furthermore, you can't "kill" items in the luxury market.

This is more a computer whose form was influenced a lot by the Air. That's it. It's not as pretty but it's still thin, and it's a lot cheaper since chances are Dell will try to sell it to people who aren't rich.

That's a very nice way of saying the Air is for idiots who have too much money and are more impressed by shiny stuff than by real merit.

If by "shiny stuff" you mean "it works really nice and feels good," then yes. That's what I'm saying.

I guess people who pay money for wallpaper are stupid? It serves no practical purpose. I guess people who buy expensive desks rather than cheap wooden ones, they're stupid? Or people who'll buy a sports car rather than a smart car? The people who'll pay money for an original painting? All really, really stupid, right?

There's a sort of design deficiency in the world of hackers and programmers. I'm certain it's not just among us, but it's here that I see it most. People really don't seem to notice things like feel and look and effect. For a lot of people a design is just a long list of features.

The Macbook Air is not a machine for people who want features. It's a machine for people who want to feel a delight when they look at their computer, for people who enjoy the feel of a really light computer tucked under their arm. It's got a beautiful form and it feels beautiful when you have it open on your lap and typing feels beautiful. Those aren't features. There isn't a site that rates how good it feels to type on a computer. There's no score for this.

That said, calling good design "shiny" and saying it lacks "real merit" is pretty damn stupid, and I find the people who look at the Macbook Air and say they don't get it a little bit despicable. It's a bad attitude that gets people nowhere and encourages deliberate blindness.

(Another way to put it is: what do you have to gain from seeing movies in a movie theater? It's expensive and the food is bad and unless you're sitting particularly close to the screen, there's nothing that it offers you that a huge TV doesn't - with one exception, which is the experience of going to a movie theater. Good design is an experience.)

Lamborghini sales are also quite small. The Macbook air is still a great piece of engineering.

It's all about status and marketing. The halo effect is real.

People don't like Apple for their marketing, though their marketing is pretty incredible. The best marketing they have are their actual products. People see people using Apple products, try them out, and fall in love.

Apple doesn't advertise showing people using their products. They don't bandwagon you. They don't tell you you're "cool" if you use Apple. Their competitors do, and sometimes they work. Apple never does. Their advertisements focus on their actual products, and their competitors can't do that because it only works if you make incredible products.

Can you imagine a commercial showing the Zune and nothing but the Zune? It would be horrible. So Microsoft shows people using the Zune so that you can see how cool it is.

Meanwhile, even without a commercial I can give a friend a 5-minute demonstration of cool Mac things and that friend will become a diehard Mac fan. At the program I attended 2 years ago, 12 people, none of them Mac users, spent a month using older iMacs. Within a year each person in the program had bought a Mac. It wasn't commercials. It was product love.

This "killer" talk is lame. It won't kill anything.

I remember seeing the Air at the top of the laptops sales charts on the Apple.com store.

at 4 lbs it's too heavy to compete with the air.

The Air is thinner, way thinner. Adamo looks more like a cheap Macbook, therefore it should compete in the lower end segment, and price, specially price.

Depends on what you consider "thinner".. The Dell would fit in a 3mm smaller slot but won't cut cake as well.

The MacBook air is a so-so piece of hardware with a world class operating system. Dell can easily best the Air at hardware but definitely not at software (unless Apple frees Leopard)

Looking at its size, weight, construction, rigidity, manufacturing process, backlit keyboard, magnetic power connector, DisplayPort interface, etc. I'd have to conclude that every facet of the Air represents the cutting edge in industrial design. I also must admit that, while clearly subjective, the majority of my coworkers and I find it aesthetically pleasing to look at.

I am curious, then, as to why you would rate it as "so-so" hardware. Because it doesn't have a removable battery? Seriously, what?

Mostly because every other Macbook air owner I know experiences overheating and random shutdowns multiple times a week:

http://blog.weatherby.net/2008/07/cool-air.html

http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/03/20/review-macbook-air

I think we all know that people who are unhappy with something usually speak up louder than those who are happy; as such, claiming that "every other" MacBook Air is flawed is (likely) severely exaggerated.

My girlfriend has a MacBook Air, it's the perfect laptop for her — it's light (she's a Uni student), well-designed, and runs fast enough to satisfy all her needs. No issues with it, so far.

I'm trying not to resort to sarcasm, but honestly. If your evidence of "so-so" hardware is an anecdotal sampling of people who may well have defective units, that's some pretty weak tea.

Hundreds of posts on Apple's forums lead me to believe that it's more than a handful of users. To pick just two of those threads:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1387729...

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1415343...

It would seem you don't have a very clear understanding of the definition of "anecdotal":

   not necessarily true or reliable, because based on personal accounts rather than facts or research

Let me put it another way: Pick for us the very paradigm of what you consider to be fantastic hardware. I could find for you -- anecdotally -- a few hundred people who have had problems with it. Does that mean you're a) a bad judge of hardware or b) that there's bound to be some small percentage of problem cases when dealing with mass-produced electronics?

Apple shipped 2 million Macintoshes last quarter alone. If even only a tenth of those were Air sales, "hundreds of posts" doesn't even add up to 1% of units sold that quarter. Any consumer electronics manufacturer (including Apple!) would kill for a defect rate of under 1%.

I apologize. I should have requested Apple to grant me access to real time information on their actual hardware failure rates instead of basing my assumptions on the two sample universes I have access to. My bad.

Put another way, when I encounter anecdotal information about a specific hardware failure I find unacceptable more than a threshold number of times, I tend to base my buy decisions on that. The converse is also true in terms of praise. That's how I bought my Macbook, that's why I am not buying this version of the Air.

Why not? Dell sells Ubuntu laptops.

I use Ubuntu myself but I think it's still a year away from my grandma being able to use it.

I love Ubuntu on the server side, but on the desktop it always feels unfinished and I usually have to hack around to get something to work. I'm at the point in my life where futzing around to fix the basics isn't much fun.

OS X is polished and works really well. Sure, I have issues with it and Apple's control fetish, but since leaving Windows and Red Hat/Gentoo/Ubuntu/Debian I've been very happy.

Ubuntu is not world-class. I think Ubuntu might be close to competing with Windows, though it still lacks a lot of basic stuff. Both Ubuntu and Windows (up to and including Windows 7) are still years away from being on the same plane as OS X. (My policy is, until I see a text editor as good as TextEdit on another operating system, I won't even consider a comparison between the two.)

   My policy is, until I see a text editor as good as 
   TextEdit on another operating system, I won't even 
   consider a comparison between the two.

You forgot to mention your first axiom:

  1) Nothing is as good as TextMate.

Be realistic here: VI(M), Notepad++, and Emacs are all great text editors.

Sorry - I was referring to non code-focused editors. The great thing about TextEdit is that it looks like Notepad when I launch it, and yet it has incredible support for design, typography, layout, and positioning. I can write most school papers in it, but it still looks and feels ultrasimple.

TextMate does some awesome stuff, from what I've heard, but it's much more focused on coding. TextEdit is more general-purpose, which is why it's my standard. Until another OS spends as much time making a kickass all-purpose editor, it probably hasn't got the level of detail that I want in my operating system.

Oh, woops! Misread TextEdit for TextMate! That said, I find that Wordpad is a fantastic simplistic tool for creating school papers. For Linux I tend to use the slightly more complex (yet still very clean) LyX.

Wordpad is really good, but it lacks the wow factor of TextEdit (which I'm slightly addicted to).

I've never used LyX; forgive me if this is a dumb question, but is it available for Ubuntu? I might boot up a virtual machine and give it a try if so.

Sure is, it's in the repo so "sudo apt-get install lyx" should grab it.

It's also available for Windows/OS X so you might be better off just trying it on your primary OS.

http://www.lyx.org/

I don't think you're going to find the kind of simplicity you enjoy in TextEdit though.

Personally I use text-editors e.g. vim, for every kind of writing I do, code or not.

Plaintext formats like http://eleanor.rubyforge.org/ (for screenplays) and Taskpaper (for planning/todo lists) are really helpful for this sort of thing.

TextEdit isn't a text editor; it's a rich text editor.

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