I currently have a maxed-out mid-2008 MacBookPro 15.4": I quite honestly despise it. Why? Because it's heavy and bulky, but slow compared to my Quad G5 PowerMac (which, I well know, is obsolete by almost all standards).
I figure I could deal with a slower machine, if it were at least light enough to be truly, effortlessly portable. That's why I've focussed on the Air as a "lateral upgrade" to ease my burden. It certainly isn't a supercomputer, but at least it's light enough to slip into my backpack and not tear a rift in my shoulder. I'll be using the machine for the usual productivity stuff: mail, surfing, iWork, very light consumer-grade multimedia stuff, and Mathematica. The latter's quite heavy-going but on the whole I don't care much if it takes five or seven seconds to tear through a statement, I'm fairly performance-agnostic provided the interface remains "snappy".
That said, I'm in something of a dilemma: at the time of writing, the MacBookAir hasn't been refreshed for 182 days versus an average of 273. That puts an expected update in mid-July; personally I'm expecting an update during WWDC '09. I'm expecting the case to be revised to feature a black bezier like all aluminium MacBooks, and the trackpad to lose it's vestigial button. At the very least, I'm expecting the next revision to feature a speed-bump and bigger drive sizes, though I'll take the SSD option whichever size is offered. In my moments of deepest opium-induced fantasy, I also glimpse the prospect of an inbuilt UMTS/"3G" chipset and a GPS receiver, but I can't hold the illusion as long as I'd like.
(Also, call me superficial but I live in mortal terror of buying a laptop just before the line is refreshed and being stuck with something "obviously obsolete".)
Now, I put it to the experts: how likely is this? Am I making myself miserable by holding out for something that probably won't arrive, or will arrive only much later, after many more months of rising frustration? I couldn't care less about price, nor am I particularly disturbed by a lack of ports and so forth, but there seems to be a large amount of pent-up demand for a MacBookAir that "doesn't suck". I'm sufficiently desperate to be considering getting a Dell Mini 9 and transforming it into a temporary Leopard "hackintosh".
I figure I could deal with a slower machine, if it were at least light enough to be truly, effortlessly portable. That's why I've focussed on the Air as a "lateral upgrade" to ease my burden. It certainly isn't a supercomputer, but at least it's light enough to slip into my backpack and not tear a rift in my shoulder. I'll be using the machine for the usual productivity stuff: mail, surfing, iWork, very light consumer-grade multimedia stuff, and Mathematica. The latter's quite heavy-going but on the whole I don't care much if it takes five or seven seconds to tear through a statement, I'm fairly performance-agnostic provided the interface remains "snappy".
That said, I'm in something of a dilemma: at the time of writing, the MacBookAir hasn't been refreshed for 182 days versus an average of 273. That puts an expected update in mid-July; personally I'm expecting an update during WWDC '09. I'm expecting the case to be revised to feature a black bezier like all aluminium MacBooks, and the trackpad to lose it's vestigial button. At the very least, I'm expecting the next revision to feature a speed-bump and bigger drive sizes, though I'll take the SSD option whichever size is offered. In my moments of deepest opium-induced fantasy, I also glimpse the prospect of an inbuilt UMTS/"3G" chipset and a GPS receiver, but I can't hold the illusion as long as I'd like.
(Also, call me superficial but I live in mortal terror of buying a laptop just before the line is refreshed and being stuck with something "obviously obsolete".)
Now, I put it to the experts: how likely is this? Am I making myself miserable by holding out for something that probably won't arrive, or will arrive only much later, after many more months of rising frustration? I couldn't care less about price, nor am I particularly disturbed by a lack of ports and so forth, but there seems to be a large amount of pent-up demand for a MacBookAir that "doesn't suck". I'm sufficiently desperate to be considering getting a Dell Mini 9 and transforming it into a temporary Leopard "hackintosh".
