So only a $200-$300 expense in a new wireless router is going to get you great wireless speed.
For someone who has just spent $1300 or more, telling they will need to spend another $300 to get the best results with their single port MB, isn't the best news. Telling them they will need a port and multiple dongles is bad enough.
Moreover, that solution only works to the extent someone has a home network server, otherwise to access the cloud they are limited by the speed of their internet service. In my case a faster router doesn't change a thing as far as accessing the cloud. And yes I do have a wireless color laser printer.
Only the 11" MBA has a 16:9 aspect ratio and yet it do not support 1080p.
I believe very few Macbook owners maintain their own movie library either by ripping DVDs or pirating. They are using services like Netflix, Popcorn Time and iTunes, and their choice of device for movie watching is an iPad.
We're comparing the rMB it to the 11" MBA. And why does anyone need 1080p on an 11" screen? There's no reason, from both a clarity, storage, and power perspective. The fact that you don't keep movies on hard drives does not reflect the majority of movie collectors, who absolutely keep their movies on hard drives, especially ones who started collecting on DVD and have since ripped their collections to digital. Watching streaming services is all well and good until you find yourself in a situation without reliable internet, and there are plenty of movies that I want to see which aren't available on the streaming services. So I don't buy it.
I would argue that everything a user does is not computational taxing (over time) except for the following tasks:
Non casual gaming
Advanced video editing (including ripping and transcoding)
Advanced audio editing
Advanced photo editing
Simulations
You're assigning your habits to everyone. For working on documents, your workflow is great (at least until the internet isn't accessible to you and you can't retrieve a document). In fact, editing documents is likely the best use of the rMB. But you behave as if photo collections aren't a major part of people's lives, and editing movies and photos isn't something that a lot people do, especially younger ones. I see the rMB like the original polycarbonate MacBook. When Apple removed the Firewire port from that MacBook there was an outcry from all those people who used Firewire connected cameras for video editing, something that MacBook was used heavily for. Apple promptly responded by putting the FW port back in the very next model. Heck, Apple gives people an audio creation/editing suite, a video editing suite, and increasingly sophisticated photo suite of software. Average consumers own copies of Photoshop. So the idea people want to access disk drives to work offline with a large number of files that don't fit on relatively small internal storage capacities, is far from unusual.
I have about 500Gb in Dropbox and there is now problem keeping all of it or a subset of it in sync with all my Macs. And I only have a 15/5 Mbit line at home.The question you should ask is this? How much new and changed data that you need to transfer or backup do you generate each day? For me the answer is almost always less than 1Gb. Usually just a few megabytes. All Internet connections I have can handle this. And I guess the answer is pretty much the same for a lot of people.
Again, all this is great until you lose your internet connection. I have a time capsule since I would never trust the cloud to back up all of my data. And most of the time the incremental backup is fine. But there are times when I change a lot of big files at once, or don't have reliable access to the internet where I'm working on them.
Why are you having your project files on an external disk?
Here lies your problem with a wireless world. You need to store your data locally or on a network service for it to make sense. No if you are doing video editing or audio editing, dealing with huge amount of data, then a wireless world is much more difficult and expensive to achieve. But then again, you should not buy a rMB at all.
Well there you go. Since this also seems to be Apple's position they have to continue offering the MBA, which means Apple is now supporting 5 product lines in a declining computer market, when they only really need 3 models.
The reality is, people do store a lot of data on local disks, as cloud solutions can be expensive, and average people don't trust their data to it, whether it's their precious family photos and home movies, or their collections of music and movies. I have well over 55,000 songs in my iTunes collection, which resides on an external drive. I can't use iTunes Match because it has a 25K limit. I can't rely on Spotify because all the artists aren't represented there, nor is it accessible without a reliable internet connection. And I don't want to store them on my limited Mac hard drive, which I use for everything. And that's but just one practical example.
So while I appreciate that the wireless world works for you, it doesn't work for everyone, and it may never will, at least in the near future. So in the interim, by limiting what the rMB can do, they end up cannibalizing their existing product line, while at the same time going to the expense of maintaining at least two extra products they don't really need.
