Of all the announcements this year, this one is definitely the biggie (although arguably, not the most significant — the AppleTV could easily trump it in long-term industry impact.) Apple’s new ultraportable was the announcement everyone was waiting for, and it’s generated the most media buzz, most of it positive. There’s no denying the machine is desirable, one thing Apple know how to do is design, and the Air is impressive even by their standards. It’s also a pretty impressive feat of engineering; a 13.3” laptop, averaging about 1cm thick and weighing a just over 1.3kg that manages to squeeze in a 1.8GHz Core2 Duo, 2GB RAM and a full-size, backlit keyboard, as well as a screen as good as you’ll find on any laptop. Oh and the battery life is quoted at an extensive (for the size) 5 hours. It really is an impressive piece of work.
Obviously, to get the size down so far, a couple of compromises have been made; it lacks an optical drive (to mitigate that can mount one from a nearby desktop machine over WiFi — a neat trick, but I wonder how fast the access will be,) has no speakers and sports a redesigned, smaller power connector, probably making the device incompatible with any existing MacBook adaptors you may have.
The basic model comes in at £1200, which isn’t excessive for a machine like this. It’s obviously much more expensive than the current crop of ultraportables from the like of Asus, and Packard Bell, but that’s not really the market segment it fits into. This isn’t a low powered palmtop, running a pared down Linux distro on A 500MHz via chip; it’s a full-spec PC squeezed into an ultraportable notebook form-factor. The 12” Vaios and Thinkpads are this device’s competition, and in that context, the price looks fairly competitive.
But I wouldn’t buy one.
Why not? That’s a very good question. It looks great, it’s got all the features I care about, is incredibly lightweight, runs my favourite workstation OS, and fits comfortably into my acceptable laptop price-range. The problem is simply one of longevity. Apple consumer goods have been coming without replacable batteries for a while now, and I’ve always been more-or-less OK with that because iPods and iPhones, at a couple of hundred quid, pretty much fall into the “replace every couple of years” price bracket anyway. Is that because I have more money than sense? Quite possibly, but when we’re talking about what qualifies as disposable technology, even I draw the line somewhere significantly south of a £1200 (or more) laptop.
It’s a shame; in so many ways, this would be the perfect laptop for me, but I can really see this really hurting its sales badly — I just can’t imagine anyone parting with that much money for something that’s only going to last as long as its battery. I know I won’t.
Update: OK — so it turns out that Apple will replace the battery for $130 (US, so I guess about £80.) That’s the cost of the battery, so fitting is effectively free. Also, a commenter called Andrew on Engadget pointed out that there’s almost certainly no discrete battery to be replaced; in order to get the thing as thin as that, they’ve likely spread the battery out across the whole inside of the case; everywhere there was a bit of space will have a battery cell in it.
So, maybe the decision was a genuine compromise, rather than a rip-off, and it looks like Apple have made the commitment to make sure people canget a new battery at low-ish cost, but I don’t think this really changes my opinion. People like the flexibility of swapping batteries out, they like the feeling of security of having a spare. Personally, I just wouldn’t be comfortable knowing that my ability to replace a dying battery is dependant on a third party continuing to offer a service that they’re only offering out of good-will in the first place.
Not as bad as I first thought then. But still a stopper for me, and, I imagine, for a lot of other people as well. In a way, it’s even more of a shame if they have a good reason for it not being replaceable; it means that the product just isn’t viable, rather than has been spoiled by a misguided attempt to upsell.
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Site Design :
The Inq have the current quoted price as 100 quid for the UK battery replacement.
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/…..-apple-air
Which basically means you need to fork out 100 quid every 2 years when the battery fails assuming the battery was not sat on a shelf somewhere using up it’s life span before you even get it since the failure is from manufacture point not when you start using it.
Or you throw it away and get the mac book air 2 of course
One of the other points I’ve seen made on the inquirer and a few other tech sites is that almost none of the Mac Book Air is actually apple design it’s all riffing off technologies, platform, and packaging that intel have designed and developed, Apple just put a shiny case round it and added a multi touch track pad.
I would suspect we will start to see other manufacturers using the same technology in their line of ultra lights before long.
In the interests of fairness, it’s worth pointing out that £100 for a laptop battery replacement is pretty much par for the course these days, whoever you buy the laptop from (my quick web-site straw-poll suggests Sony are quite a bit more expensive, HP and Toshiba are about the same, and Dell, Asus and Packard Bell are about a tenner cheaper,) and they’re all using Li-ion or Li-poly, so it’s not like other manufacturers’ last longer either – except the Li-ion ones, which might last slightly longer. On the other hand, no other manufacturer requires you send your laptop off to the factory to do the replacement, and I’d resent being without it for a week.
Hmm maybe most of the sites I found were at most 50-60 quid though they could have been of suspect quality they were not direct from the manufacturers but then most of the batterys they produce are Chinese made these days anyway so it probably differs only in what sticker gets slapped on the casing. Your sony battery is just as likely to explode as your knock off cheapy chinese ebay special these days.
It seems a little bit of an odd choice to integrate the battery, I mean MP3/media players you can argue that in two years it will be so hopelessly obsolete that most people will have chucked it before the battery dies but a laptop? Usually they are not so fast to turn over especially if the thing cost 1200 quid. Seems a weird decision. You can never carry two batteries if you need it for more than the admittedly respectable (if accurate in actual use) 5 hours it will work run for. Of course these days carrying more than one Li-ion battery makes you a terrorist in the eyes of homeland security et al so maybe that’s a good thing.
I mean the whole reformable battery idea they came up with for Li-Poly might be one reason, but from what I’ve heard making the battery in anything other than rectangular shape was so expensive it makes it impractical.
It seems like a device where design trumps practicality and to an extent function it is definitely a gimmick something for rich people to show off and the super thinness of it is impressive probably more so in the flesh as it were. But still how thin do you need a laptop to be.
I was originally expecting them to go down a more eeepc route small cheap ish solid state but they seem to have gone more for a viao or xps or that fujitsu lifebook thing sort of market. Guess the margins are better.
I have no idea why they’d make it non-replaceable, it seems like craziness to me. I can only put it down to one of two things:
1) They’re experimenting to see if people will put up with it. It cuts costs and gives them more flexibility to make it integrated, so they have an interest in pushing it, if people will play along. I’m sure most people never replace their laptop’s battery anyway (I know I’m still using the 3.5 year old one that came with my Powerbook,) but not doing it and being ok with not having the choice are two different things. I guess only time will tell.
2) They’re trying to make a splash. This is Apple, they know their users want an Apple ultraportable, but being Apple, they can’t just make an ultraportable; it’s got to be the best in some way. So they release the first generation Air as “The Thinnest Notebook in the world.” They make almost no money on it, and in fact reduce the machine’s functionality in order to squeeze the size down as much as possible. A year later, the Air has made it’s name as a tiny notebook and Apple have some feedback on what users really can’t live without. They launch the second generation Air, quietly dropping the claim of being thinnest (because it isn’t anymore,) with those features re-added and an extra .5cm on the thickness to make room. They manage to sell it having a replaceable battery as a major feature enhancement.
Or, I guess it could be a bit of both. They go for option 1, and if the outcry is too loud, or sales too low, they fall back to option 2.
I would imagine you are right about it being a bit of both. Though cost wise this looks like a reasonably high margin item to me, most of the bits are not that fancy. I mean it’s spec is not bad but not exactly world shaking for that sort of money.