Image via WikipediaIs the MacBook Air a Peek Into the Future of Laptops? - PCWorld"We think all notebooks will look like these one day." Those were Steve Jobs's words when he took the stage on October 20th to introduce a refreshed version of the MacBook Air, making it clear that Apple's newest computers were a harbinger of things to come.
Many people insist on calling the Air an overpriced netbook despite the fact that every single one of its specifications would easily blow any other computer in that category out of the water. But much of the analysis on this new product has been on its immediate usefulness as a mobile computing platform, rather than on its significance for the long-term evolution of the notebook computer.
A triumph of integration
There are a number of major changes in the Air that clearly tag it as a forward-looking system; it seems clear that Apple has gone out of its way to redefine the very concept of portable computers.
Those old enough to remember a time when laptops were still a niche area of computing will also remember how alien they looked inside. While the desktop industry was already well on its way to standardizing component sizes, specifications, and arrangements, laptop manufacturers were faced with the unenviable task of fitting a whole computer into some sort of portable format--and that was before loading it up with heavy, bulky batteries.
The early attempts at this process resulted in some rather bizarre contraptions that were called "portable" simply because they happened to be fitted with a handle: case in point, the 16-pound "luggable" Macintosh Portable. It wasn't until the industry started rethinking the components themselves that the form factor of laptops started to evolve into what we're used to today. The need for retooling and rethinking made laptops expensive for many years until, eventually, the entire market once again standardized on the components that make today's laptops possible: 2.5-inch hard disks, ultra-slim optical drives, smaller and less power-hungry processors, more efficient batteries, and so on.
If Apple wants to push laptop design to a new level, the newest Air clearly indicates that the roadmap it has chosen points in one direction: integration. A picture of the Air's underbelly clearly shows that no effort has been spared to squeeze every last cubic inch of space from the device's interior. This has meant letting go of the traditional 2.5-inch casing that solid-state drives have adopted in favor of a set of a chips on a circuit board (which is really all an SSD is, of course), shedding the optical drive, and tightly integrating every chip into a custom design that minimizes clutter and leave as much room as possible for those still bulky batteries.
From this perspective, then, the Air is much more than a thin laptop: it is a proof of concept that a powerful computer doesn't need to come into a big package. If Apple can squeeze a machine like the Air into a container that others have only been able to use for underpowered devices--such as the many netbooks currently on the market--imagine what it can do with a system like the MacBook Pro.
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