11″ MacBook Air Tailor-Made For iCloud All Along?
Writing for Macworld, Andy Ihnatko, says he’s been checking out a Google Chromebook, and keeps getting stuck on the fact that this $499 Internet-only machine costs as much as some nice name-brand Windows notebooks that can literally do everything the Chromebook can do (so long as you have Google’s Chrome browser installed, but doesn’t everyone these days?), and will also run hundreds of thousands of Windows apps and games along with the exciting feature of being able to actually function as a computer even when there’s no Wi-Fi present, as opposed to the Chromebook, which is totally useless if you’re out of the nearest Wi-Fi router’s range, that is on most of the planet.
On the other hand, Ihnatko observes that when Apple released the 11-inch MacBook Air last year without the added context of iCloud, it made only a little more sense to him than the Chromebook does today, but with Apple’s forthcoming iCloud online service, the diminutive laptop suddenly makes perfect, elegant sense. The advantages of a fully-functional Mac barely larger than a comic book were of course immediately and intensely compelling, but the question nagged as to why Apple would even bother making such a niche MacBook with so many tradeoffs, and noting that the 13-inch MacBook Air At $1299, its too expensive to compete with the base white plastic MacBook or even the iPad and not powerful enough to compete with the similarly-priced MacBook Pro.
However, Ihnatko says he can now belatedly identify the 11″ Air as Apple’s first public salvo in their cloud strategy, and that its 64-gig drive that he originally thought was a complete dealbreaker (an awful lot of early adopters didn’t agree) will be a lot more acceptable once iCloud’s 5 gigabytes of free cloud storage are available, and with iTunes In The Cloud you won’t need to keep your entire media library on your iCloudBook – er… MacBook Air, but youll still be able to store enough music and videos on it to keep you entertained when you’re out of Wi-Fi range, so while a 64 GB boot drive is still “pretty damned teeny” if you intend to use the 11 Air as a real MacBook, he’s done the math and pronounces it just the perfect size for an iCloudBook.
Another 11″ MacBook Air advantage is that it’s a full-fledged a Mac OS device, you won’t need to translate files between mobile and desktop app formats, and unlike with an with an iPad, you can use the same Mac OS software youve got on your office workstation.
Viewed in an iCloud context, Ihnatko declares the 11-inch Air to be a true signature product for Apple and the most significant piece of hardware Apple has produced in the past decade whose name isnt preceded by a lower-case i, and with it becoming clear that Apple has been building up to the iCloudBook for some time, evidenced by their slimming down the size of the Mac OS despite the incredibly price of hard disk storage these days, while aggeessively promoted full-screen app user interfaces at the API level, which makes the MacBook Air’s 11-inch display way more practical.
Interesting and plausible assessment, although the 11″ MacBook Air has obviously exerted broad consumer appeal without reference to iCloud. I think 64 GB is ridiculously constrained storage capacity, but hopefully that will be addressed with the refreshment expected on Thursday.