Post-Macworld Wrap-up Part 1: MacBook Air

An elegant Macworld Wrap up from my friend Adam: 

Okay, enough with the bombarding me with messages pleading for my unique take on the Macworld product announcements (Mom).  I needed a second to process, but now I’m ready.  Disclaimer: I’m not sure if any of this is unique - during the past few days where I was never outside of a 1.5 mile radius of Macworld, I’d never been more off-the-grid since the dawn of the Internet.  For some reason both of my hotels had trouble with wifi and as for Mobile Safari, wherever you were, the 9 assholes to your right were always soaking up the valuable EDGE bandwidth that you desperately needed to Twitter something time-sensitive and critically nerdy.  That said, much of what you see below may have already been said in one of the 4000 unread news feed items I dare not open.

Air.  This thing, like any Apple product, is best appreciated by actual touch.  What your mind may conceive of in an irregularly-shaped laptop may manifest more like the awkward Amazon Kindle rather the magnificent slight wedge of aluminum that the Air becomes on first grasp.  You hold it for a second - its heft is no more than that of a well-built metal clipboard, its thin end, when closed could be used to slice cheese - and it immediately becomes something other than, something beyond a laptop.  Akin to the introduction of the flat panel TV, in approximating planar flatness it subtracts the dimension of depth from the whole traditional two-part laptop form (thick bottom where you put your junk, slightly less thick top where you see your junk) which hasn’t really been challenged since its debut.

But hold up, where’s the ports?  Oh, there they are, snugly hidden by a creamy little trapdoor.  And besides the Magsafe power port on the opposite side, there are but two of them - one USB, one for external display.  And I’ve heard that people have problems with this.  In fact, I initially had problems with this.  Where’s the firewire?  70% of my life is in two Lacie Rugged drives I have on hand at all times.  The unfirewired life is not worth living, or hasn’t been in this hard drive-paradigmed world.  But then you realize that this hard drive-paradigmed world is not the world for which the Air is intended.  And this is its crucial distinction: the Air is not just a lighter laptop, it is a conceptual shift in personal computing.

People have been comparing the Air to the Cube.  Full wedgie-deserving disclosure: when Jobs announced the Cube at the Keynote in 2000, I watched from home (remember when we could do that?) and when that 8” block of solid pixiedust came out on its pedestal and the crowd swelled with excitement, I shed a tear.  No, I wept like a baby.  I high-fived my imaginary friends and I fist-pumped in the air.  The Cube won me partly because it was pretty, but mostly because it represented such a shift.  As it happened, the Cube turned out to be more of a proof-of-concept, not intended for mass adoption, but meant to pull our heads out of the notion that the guts of a powerful computer must be stuffed in a large, noisy box so cumbersome and heavy it had to be left on the floor.  We were meant to disassociate mass from power, in preparation for the coming evolution of supercomputing laptops, and in many ways, the Cube did its job and paved the way for its successor, the Mini.

So, too, is the Air a proof-of-concept.  The concepts it sets out to prove are the clearest ones implied by its name: that data is weightless, that storage is wireless (a concept augmented by the parallel release of Apple’s new hard drive-equipped wireless router dubbed Time Capsule), and that connectivity is ubiquitous.  The first two concepts are pretty standard stuff, theoretically, that Apple is now doing the walking of the walk, putting its nose to the grindstone and cracking the whip to train us as users into getting through our thick skulls.  Because we will not go gracefully into this idea of weightless data - it’s been a long time coming, preparing us for the migration of our data offsite.  We use our Gmail, we use our flickr, but we love our cables because our cables tie us to our stuff like a leash to a hyperactive toddler.  But in denying us our cables, the Air is whispering sternly in our ear what must be learned if we ever hope to fly in a world of ubiquitous connectivity.  And one might argue that our world of ubiquitous connectivity is still largely undeveloped because we are too comfortable being tethered (we are attached to being attached).  To throw one more shoddy metaphor in the mix, we are comfortable moving our shit around on trains because we have not yet been forced into airplanes.

The third part of the equation presents more of a problem, as Gruber notes in his Macworld predictions at the beginning of the week.  The absence of built-in 2.5G or 3G data connectivity is glaring in the face of its killer-appiness in the iPhone.  While a built-in connectivity solution will almost certainly come in future iterations, it’s reasonable to expect that Apple has a remedial solution of its own, such as USB modem for accessing the AT&T EDGE network (the perfect $99 accessory to your new Air), or software compatibility with iPhone’s connectivity via Bluetooth.  What I like about the dongle modem solution is that its DNA can be found in something like the iSight camera - an obvious need filled by an Apple-branded accessory which eventually was built and packaged standard in the main hardware.

The other notable bullet point of the Air is its adoption of the iPhone’s multitouch functionality in its trackpad.  This a blatant, bell-clear statement of intent on the part of Apple, stamped into its hardware, that has only been hinted at in software so far: that there is a shared UI language being learned and taught between the two parts of its personal computing family.  It may seem a small step to take that allows you to scale and rotate an image on your laptop with the gestures you would use on you iPhone, but the small step represents a huge leap: that the two parts are making overtures towards each other rather than diverging.  This is not revolutionary stuff, but it is a perfect indicator of the coming advancements.

Regardless of whether the Air is adopted en masse and does big sales, this is all good stuff that is implied behind the scenes of its release.  The trojan horse of the Air is that it is light, it is new and it is damn sexy.  But inside is an army of paradigm-shifters, adapting us to the next phase of computing: one in which the world is your hard drive.