MacBook Air, is it here to stay?
The MacBook Air by Apple is a nice piece of engineering. In the Macworld 2008 Keynote, Steve Jobs went into detail on what was needed to make it so thin. Leave out an optical drive, flatten the battery, use an iPod hard-drive and shrink the connector-board of the cpu. This last bit concerns me a bit. The CEO and Chairman of Intel, Paul Otellini came on stage telling that it was a big headache for them to make it so small, that it took them over half a year, but that they're pleased with the outcome. If it took them so long to make it, will they put in that same effort when the MacBook Air is due for a cpu upgrade? Or, given the worse than expected results of Intel in 2007, will Intel forgo on the needed R&D?
My prediction is that the MacBook Air will receive fewer cpu upgrades than the other Apple computers. And that it will be taken out of production within two years.
Zaaf
1 comment:
The main concern is not the processor speed but the heat. The latest and greatest of ASML plus some neat fabrication management tricks will guarantee a better control of feature sizes and thus heat development and error occurrences; the things that determine at what speed the processor is made to run after its fabrication. I think indeed we will see speed upgrades for the MAcBook Air, but since it's already the least powerful Mac out there don't expect it to ever be screaming. But it isn't made for heavy-duty applications anyway, just note-taking, Keynote-ing and simple browsing on conferences. So the target audience will love it despite it being underspecced for us MacBook Pro lovers.
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