playing with a macbook air at the stockton street apple store



I managed to get out for a few moments yesterday while at a meeting in San Francisco and went for a return visit to the Apple Store on Stockton Ave, my third visit there in four years. As usual, it was busy, and at the front of the store were, you guessed it, several MacBook Air models. What was interesting is that people weren't so much trying out all the usual things one does with a computer, like checking out how fast applications launch, etc. Rather, people tended to examine the MBA with the lid closed, picking it up and turning it over to grasp its thin dimensions.

I certainly did the same, and yes it is definitely thin. The display is excellent, as is the keyboard. For all the dismay about the slower hard disk speed and older Intel CPU, I found it to be pretty fast, although a few minutes' of messing around is certainly not going to give an accurate picture as far as performance. I figured I'd try the new trackpad gestures that are like those on the iPhone, including the ability to move forward and backward in browsers with the trackpad. Surprisingly, this was not enabled on the machine I was using, so I went into System Preferences and tried to enable this. Maybe it was the particular MBA I was using, but the trackpad preference window was illegible, since the previous System Prefs window continued to merge with it. I quit and relaunched System Preferences, and same thing. Another attempt didn't even load the trackpad preferences; rather, it just said Loading... and after a minute of that, I bailed. Granted, it's clearly a software glitch, most likely on that particular unit, and I didn't get to try another one i the short time I was in the store. But I felt like I was back at Circuit City years ago playing with a demo Mac that was neglected and buggy. Maybe it's something with 10.5 (Leopard). But I was really surprised that a relatively new demo model in one of the main Apple Stores out there didn't have one of its salient features enabled, and couldn't be enabled due to a software glitch anyway.

Am I nitpicking this? Sure. But I've always been struck by how choreographed everything is in an Apple Store. The lighting, the design, which computer models are placed where...everything is arranged for maximum effect, as it should be. But very importantly, all the computers I've ever used at an Apple Store worked flawlessly. System glitches just never happened to me before in that setting. Maybe there's a first time for everything.

Anyway, back to the MBA. It's a lovely machine, although I have to say that apart from the extra weight and perhaps a more scrunched keyboard, my 12“ iBook G4 that I'm typing this on at 39,000 feet is a pleasure to use on a long flight. Plus it plays DVDs, which would require a USB-based Superdrive for an additional $99 on the MBA. Then again, my iBook was just over half the price of the base MBA, so if you have money to spare on a new MBA, what's another $99 for a Superdrive?

And as I think about it more, my initial negative reactions to the MBA perhaps were a bit too harsh. The point of having a MBA isn't to replace one's desktop machine or even one's laptop workhorse. It's for schlepping around so that you have all the basic stuff you need and no more. It's a minimalist computer, and what it does retain is very good. I suspect the price will come down in a few months, and that would likely spur more sales of the MBA. Right now, I think many people are gawking at it but haven't gotten to the point where they understand the logic of a more minimalist laptop.

Posted: Sat - February 16, 2008 at 10:54 AM          

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