We all know what happens when the combination of a boring weekend, a loaded credit card and an arrogant salesperson in a electronic’s store come together on a early Sunday morning:
The purpose of the early-morning-shopping was to get a small travel-laptop such as the ASUS Eepc to check email on the go and resulted in a gorgeous MacBook Air instead.
Not sure if the salesperson was completely asleep at 9am in the morning, but as I strolled through the store I spotted the ultra-thin and light MacBook Air – best of all, the label read R 12,999 (!). The Apple ZA store confirmed that their price is from R 17,999 and they mentioned that for that price I would probably only get a regular Mac.
If the store made a mistake in labeling it – it is pretty tough for them – the sales-people should learn not to treat their customers like shit and all ten of them were either reading their newspapers or having a casual chat while careful avoiding any customers.
Wrong! It is indeed a brand new MacBook Air – thin as a wafer and packed with latest technology such as Built-in AirPort Extreme Wi-Fi wireless networking (based on IEEE 802.11n draft specification and IEEE 802.11a/b/g), Built-in Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR (Enhanced Data Rate) and a whole lot more.
Certainly a laptop for coolness and light-weight (1.3kg). The magnetic power-cable is just one of the wow-introductions – as soon as you move the cable close to the MacBook Air, the laptop seems to “invisibly” suck the cable to the connector – schweet.
The backlit keyboard with ambient light sensor for automatic adjustment of keyboard illumination and screen brightness (and that glowing Apple logo) make people stare when you work on it.
The solid-state trackpad with multi-touch gesture support is also something I have not seen – it supports supports two-finger scrolling, pinch, rotate, swipe, tap, double-tap, and drag capabilities.
Remote disk
The MacBook Air was already pre-installed, something I generally do not like and as I am about to start a clean-install I was wondering how I get the DVDs into the laptop. Well, the MacBook Air has no DVD-drive!!! Steve and his crew have cooked up the “remote disc”-feature. You install a small application on your Windows box, pop-in the Mac OS X install disc and then reboot the MacBook Air while holding down the Option key.
Within a few seconds the Macintosh logs into the wireless router, picks up that the Mac OSX install DVD is shared on a Windows machine and then happily continues installing Mac OSX —- remotely (and over the air!!!).
As user friendly and idiot safe the OSX is, Bill Gates has certainly brain-washed me and as I work on the MacBook Air, I find myself wondering, why it could not be that easy on another OS.