The state of the Mac World
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Toys & gadgets, Storage, Hardware, Mobile, Apple on
The Mac Air is cute, shiny, lightweight – and a true reflection of the Mac market in many ways.
Walking around the show floor at MacWorld shows the difference between the Mac and PC markets. There was the new Mac version of Office of course, Office 2008, which combines the logically arranged big icons of 2007 Office with the menus of every other version, adding the SmartArt and XML file formats without making a fuss about them. There was Bento, the build-your-own-catalogue tool for people who find FileMaker too complicated. There was Parallels, making an excellent business of putting Windows onto the Mac.
And then there were the colours. You can thank the Mac market for the different colour cases for iomega’s portable eGo hard drives, because Mac users are used to colours. We saw whale-print neoprene laptop sleeves, embroidered neoprene laptop sleeves, oversize purple leather handbags designed to take notebooks and more rubber, leather, plastic and metal iPod and iPhone cases than you could shake an unlocked iPhone at. Whatever your tastes in technology as personal jewellry, there’s a case to suit.
It’s great to see so much style; when I bought my Portégé 2000 back in 2001, I hunted high and low for a stylish, small case that didn’t make me feel like a corporate drone. I had to go to a Japanese stationery store in San Jose to find a protective sleeve and even then it was black. Now, whether your heart’s desire is a MacBook Air – the first Apple notebook in a very long time that you can truly call ultraportable – or a 17” MacBook Pro that needs its own wheeled suitcase, you can snap on a red cover or stick on a Van Gogh skin.
If your heart’s desire is a touchscreen Mac, that’s not quite as easy. You have to take your Mac to Axiotron and have it undergo major surgery to add a Wacom layer and remove the keyboard. (And if you want to use it in portrait mode, run BootCamp and Vista on it, as Apple hasn’t built screen rotation into the Leopard graphics drivers). If your heart’s desire is a MacBook Air and a second battery, you either need to be very skilled with a screwdriver (and we wouldn’t advise doing it on a transatlantic flight) or you have to go to BatteryGeek and buy an external battery that plugs into the MagSafe power port. You’ll have to wait until they make a new tip for the new MagSafe connector for the Air; Apple hasn’t licensed them the details of the MagSafe connector so they’re reverse engineering it, along with Nokia and dozens of other connectors.
If your heart’s desire is a 7” ultramobile, or a computer built right into a TV screen rather than an extra box (no matter how stylish the box), or any other niche form factor, there isn’t a Mac for you. That’s not a criticism of Apple; Apple is making computers for the largest audience it can get. It can’t afford to be HP, Dell, OQO, Motion Computing and Asus rolled into one. Apple isn’t going to license the Mac OS (or lets VMWare and Parallels virtualise it on non-Mac hardware) because that means supporting a lot of different hardware and writing a lot of different drivers. The choice isn’t what style of machine, it’s which Mac and what colour accessories.
The PC market is about choice in a different way. The Toshiba Portégé R500 is lighter than the Air even with an optical drive in the case and as thin as the thickest slice of the Air; it doesn’t look nearly as sleek but it was available last summer, and it wasn’t the first ultraportable PC, just the lightest one so far. Hardly any of them have looked as good as a Mac and while you can get stick-on skins for every HP laptop – and the new Artist’s Edition has gorgeous colours and designs printed right into the case – you can’t get a purple brushed metal clip-on case custom built to fit. By definition, Mac users don’t need the range of hardware choice you get with the PC (or they’d have bought a PC instead) and PC users will continue to envy Mac users their stylish design and colourful accessories
At least the lime-green neoprene sleeves will look good on my shiny white Toshiba R400 tablet…
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