February 1, 2008
MarkBernstein.org
 

Fresh Air

The new Macintosh Air has arrived at Eastgate. It's currently loading applications. First impressions:

The Air stakes out a new niche. It gives you connectivity, CPU, an operating system, and your key applications and documents. It's a home away from home. It's an accessory, not your only computer. It's the luxury model of the XO.

I've long thought that, in the future, we'll all carry around big iPods with all our applications and media, and plug them into generic computational docks that will supply bandwidth and standard operating environments in two or three flavors. This is something else: instead of a bundle of data, it's a portable operating environment with a small pile of data and access to the rest through the 'net.

The other day, I saw a quote from a 20-year old student at a British university who said that she and her roomate couldn't sleep unless they could see the little blinking lights on their laptops.

Of course, in three years the SSD hard drive will be 240G instead of 60G, and that might change the equation again.

Finally, the Air should be a terrific notemaking machine. Hello, Tinderbox.