Type Cast

Well, the speculation was true. Apple have today announced the MacBook Air.

I must admit it looks like an exercise in packaging, as with all Apple products. One thing to point out is that the ‘real’ images on the Apple site look loads better than the camera phone shots on the streaming news feeds from the actual Keynote address.

Things I like about it. Well, the size for a start. I use a 15″ MacBook Pro at work and having one at home seems like overkill for my domestic Flickr, iPhoto, iTunes and Safari activities. Especially as pretty much all of my home mac use is literally laptop-based. The ability to connect to another machine’s optical drive will save £65 by not having to purchase the separate drive. Let’s face it, I rarely insert CDs or DVDs into my machine at home, preferring a portable hard drive for storage and for the rare occasions when I install software, doing it wirelessly will be fine. The development of the track pad to include more sophisticated gestures akin to the iPhone and iPod Touch is a nice development.

What I’m not so sure about, however, is the price point. The entry level model seems to sit awkwardly, hovering £100 below the base MacBook Pro which is faster, can drive a bigger external display, has a larger hard drive, upgradeable memory, removable battery etc etc. The 1.8 GHz model is £229 more expensive than a 17″ MacBook Pro! Looking at the options, that solid state memory is over 600 quid! I know producing something on that size is expensive but this might end up being a repeat of the days when users were confused as to whether to get a 14″ G4 iBook or a 12″ G4 PowerBook. Didn’t take long for Apple to kill the 12″ pro-level machine.

I don’t know, what I’m pretty sure of though is that this will suck loads of mac fans in and probably points to the future of their laptop development in the omission of the optical drive and a reliance on faster wireless networks for reading and writing files. Remember what people said with the first iMac omitting the floppy drive? And look where we are now!

Suffice to say, mine’s on pre-order! The base-spec one if you were wondering.

I’ve had Leopard (or Mac OSX 10.5) installed on my machine for about five weeks now. And I have to say, it’s been a less than perfect experience. The installation itself was the usual, seamless Apple beautifulness. Simple to follow dialogue boxes that didn’t tax the imagination.

It’s using it in the real world which has thrown up the problems. Firstly, Firefox seems to have become very unstable. Get plenty of tabs open and start to flick between them. I’ve been met, on a daily basis, by the spinning beach ball of death and the need to force quit.

Some of Photoshop CS3’s palettes have stopped working. Try editing the type size or the corner radius of a rounded rectangle with the ‘Options’ tools along the top of the screen. It’ll work once and then never again, with rendering errors and all sorts of other brokenness.

Some things work, but seem to be a retrograde step in usability. In iCal the tray showing an appointment’s details has disappeared, only to be replaced by an ajaxesque pop up panel. There is no way to quickly view appointment details. You are forced to double click each appointment to show the dreadful popup and then click ‘Done’ to close it.

The dock, about which a lot has been said already, is fine but the blue fuzzy application active markers are too subtle for my liking.

Don’t get me wrong there are a lot of things I like, ‘Quicklook‘ being one of the best, but these issues are seriously hampering productivity and efficiency - something that I hail the mac for over a Windows machine.