Apple Announces Macbook Air… Ditches Optical Drive?
Yesterday was MacWorld Expo 2008 San Francisco and as was speculated by mac rumor specialists Apple released a new notebook called the Macbook Air. It’s a super sleek machine weighing in at 3 pounds. It has a 13.3 inch screen, and it’s 3/4 of an inch thick. It’s so thin folks it even fits into an envelope!
The Macbook Air definitely has that wow factor, but I wonder if it’s too thin (and fragile?) for practical everyday use. Three pounds is ridiculously light. All the ports are hidden behind a small trapdoor mechanism called a “port hatch” that pulls down to expose the USB, Micro-dvi, and headphone jack. What about the firewire port and ethernet port — Apple seemed to leave those out? And how sturdy are those hatch doors anyway? Apple also had to sacrifice the optical drive to make the Macbook Air so thin. Is this a sign of where the optical drive is headed in the future — off to the data storage graveyard along with the floppy disk that Apple decided to ditch when it introduced the first iMac? Or did Apple just have to ditch too much to pull this thing off?
It seems a little too early in the game to ditch the optical drive in my opinion and lugging around an external drive does not sound appealing to me, but what do I know. I probably don’t use my optical drive as often as I think, but my gut says it might be too soon to ditch it. Another plus, as an upgrade users can choose a solid-state hard drive with no moving parts. I really can’t wait to see the product in person regardless of my equipment concerns.
UPDATE: I just read this post that theorizes that Apple may have intentionally left the cd/dvd drive out of the Macbook Air to subtly nudge users into using iTunes solely for music rather than ripping from CDs, and it may also help promote new movie rentals if one cannot watch a DVD.
