on 29 February 2008
Is the MacBook Air thin because we really need it to be thin, or just to show off? Discuss.
I’m not saying I don’t like the Air. It looks great in photos. But don’t you find yourself reacting the same way as when you see Keira Knightley in a film? Eat something! If I wanted to look at bones on a big screen, I’d go to an archaeology lecture! Nobody needs to be that skinny. It’s just a potentially destructive fad.
How did we end up here? In June 1999, MacUser had the latest PowerBook on the cover with the headline ‘To die for: backstage with the supermodels’. See, the G3 laptop was only 43mm round the waist. Well, you could fit two Airs in there and still have room for a packet of manila envelopes. Controversially, achieving that size meant chucking out the PowerBook’s second expansion slot. The Air has none.
Another milestone of miniaturisation was the iPod nano. Launching it in 2005, Steve Jobs boasted that it would fit in that odd little pocket in a pair of jeans. By an amazing coincidence, he was wearing a pair of jeans in which there was indeed something odd about that little pocket: it was extra large. D’oh! But would we really have wanted our nanos any smaller?
Some other Apple announcements could have benefited from the ‘big pocket’ trick. By standing very close to the audience while placing the machine far away, John Sculley could have made the 1989 Mac Portable look portable. In 1996, Gil Amelio could have pretended he was paying only a modest price for Jobs’ NeXT operating system by hiring David Copperfield to make the pile of cash appear to fit inside a single truck.
Anyway, the nano was followed by the 2006 iPod shuffle, which was so small that not only would it fit in your littlest pocket, it would probably get lost in there, tucked under a stamp or tangled up in a hairgrip. To prevent this, it came with a clip, but at this size, what could you realistically clip it to – an eyelash? Never mind the lack of an LCD screen, what it really needed was a tracking device.
Still, the tiny shuffle has remained popular, except with Apple Store employees, who can’t sign off a stocktake until they go through the iPod section with a dustpan and brush and pick over the sweepings with tweezers. ‘Is that another shuffle?’ ‘Where?’ ‘Under that contact lens.’ ‘Um… I can just see what looks like a little bug.’ ‘Oh, you mean it plays your music in random order? It’s actually meant to do that.’
And of course, where Apple goes, others inevitably follow. One of Panasonic’s tiniest iPod rivals was promoted with an ad that shows a gym bimbo working out to a Barry White track. With no music player visible, the headphone cord disappears inside her shorts. Geddit?
Fair enough, it’s probably a lot more comfortable than a CD Walkman. But when most people buy an MP3 player, they just want it to fit in a pocket. And when most people buy a laptop, they just want it to fit on their lap. Whether it’s slim enough to go in the internal mail is probably not such a big deal.
‘Bob, when I asked you to send me over that presentation, I only needed the Keynote file, not your whole MacBook.’ ‘Sorry, it slipped so easily into that manila envelope that I couldn’t resist. Can you send it back now?’ ‘All right, I’ll just copy off the preso onto a USB stick. If I unplug the mouse I can slot it into this single USB port… No, it doesn’t seem to fit right. Hang on, I’ve got an Ethernet point here I can hook up to… Ah. No Ethernet. Look, I’ll just pop out and get onto the WiFi at Starbucks, then I can email the file back to myself. Wow, Bob, this thing is so easy to carry – talk about convenient!’
I suppose we should be grateful that Apple didn’t go the way of Asus and its Eee PC. True, the Air does follow the same trend of labelling ultraportables with single long vowels. Will Sony’s next launch be the Ooh or the Aah? Or, if they can’t decide, the Err?
But the Eee isn’t just ultraportable, it’s ultra-cheap. Too cheap to include a proper processor, screen, operating system or storage. OK, it’s small and light to carry, but no more so than half a brick, and no more use. Far better to take the Apple route and create a laptop that only has the less essential bits missing and only costs five times as much.
Which just leaves one question. How come the iMac, which you’re not even supposed to carry around, is too skinny to accommodate a decent bloody graphics card? Discuss.
Adam Banks will never be too rich or too thin.
adambanksdotcom Apple founder @ronaldgwayne has had several careers; on this showing, tech policy punditry could be a keeper