I have just ordered the big mother desktop you referred to in your previous post. So excited.

Get a Sony Vaio and all your laptop worries will be over.

Standard Tech Support solution….

“Have you tried rebooting?”

CO: he needs Firewire because the only way to mount one MacBook as a drive on another is via Firewire. USB is not symmetrical like Firewire is so you cannot just connect the two machines that way.

That said, the Air is as other point out a second machine, not a primary, so it might not be sucha good idea to migrate everything over.

hey! the day I need tech support to help me I’ll hang up my jock!

You know you are getting old when you start complaining you are too stupid to work technology. Just barricade yourself in the Executive Dining Room and call tech support. No, wait. They don’t have a solution for stupid.

It’s tough to stay on the cutting edge of technology without getting cut. Think of it as a learning experience, so you bleed a few dollars for your efforts, you will get over it.

I use both PC and MAC i like things that both offer PC has more games for my gaming side though i only play WoW on my mac runs much smoother. i wish at work we had macs but alas the us military deems it prudent to you use old windows programs, and i mean OLD. for my mac i love my music and video editing capabilities but alas there simply isnt a good hybrid of the two yes you can say you can run windows on your mac but it sucks not that windows doesnt suck on pc also but thats why i use a linyx operating system with a fake windows interface all the easy use for my games with none of the hassel.

also i love reading your blog to see all the people who are clearly going to die early from stroke or heart attacks nothing like listening to people getting stressed over nothing. ciao.

dude, it’s
Hans Christian AndersEn
not Anderson

It’s amazing how many people are missing the point of what the MacBook Air is all about. It is definitely not meant for everyone. For those of you who use an optical drive on a daily basis, it’s not for you (unless you don’t mind carrying around the super drive attachment). For those of you who like to keep your entire music and photo libraries with you all times, it’s not for you. There are loads of people who try to adopt this as a standard laptop and then complain about it. This is a SUB-notebook — meaning it is a small, compact, mobile-minded computer. In no way is the Air, or any sub-notebook for that matter, meant to be your primary computer. It is intended to be a light-weight traveling companion. Something you can throw in your bag and not have to think twice about because it is so light it can easily be carried anywhere you need to go.

Apple fanatics are so easy to goad: It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. They’re always so defensive. “Hey! I heard the new Airports don’t work with the pre-N standard!” Is sure to raise both your Twitter and Digg ratings and your placement on Google

I was linked to this story via Fake Steve Jobs, BTW. I’m sure that’s bound to piss off a few Maclets, too.

The Printer manufacturers are responsible for creating and updating the printer drivers not Apple.

Well, I, for one, would like to know how you install my Epson 1280 and 3800 so that you can adjust for the quality of paper, the DPI, etc. Right now the printers work, but all the sublteties that were in the old Tiger drivers are gone.

I, for one, do understand, to a point (emphasis on that), some of the rabid defense of Apple products and stock by their fans.

Do you remember the battle of the iPhone projections last year? In the midst of some rumor reporting by fairly major players in the financial analysis business showing Apple and the IPhone were getting creamed, Shaw Wu went out and did some hard counting and found it all a bunch of hot air about nothing. Now Shaw Wu takes his lumps (often unfairly) from the fans sometimes but this dude knows what he is doing. Now 10 million looks to be a tad conservative.

Some folks out there tried to spin the illicit use of iPhones in China as something bad. When people from a country spend double the product’s price to get something that only half works like it is supposed to, isn’t that good news? Can you spell Apple store in Beijing during the Summer Olympics? (Never mind those restive Tibetians and their pushy leader - they will be all taken out and shot later after everybody goes home if indeed our Chinese friends wait THAT long).

Do you remember when it was taken nearly as gospel that when Apple dropped the word ‘Computers’ from its name that they were suddenly no longer going to make computers? This was real reporting from people who were respected and should know better.

Last week, there was a prominent post concerning the Air running so hot that you couldn’t hold it in your lap to work. What was THAT all about? If it would have been just some lone weirdo blogger that would have been fine but this guy was sponsored by a major magazine and it got picked up in a lot of places because of that association.

My wife has been keeping a log of all of the bogus finaicial and sales projections that have been floating around over the last couple of years (and they were many, many, many, many - Apple to 105 by summer - anybody want to take the short side of that bet NOW) with the sole intention of jamming them up their author’s butt when they turn out to be beyond false.

There has just been a never ending drum beat of this nonsense to the point that some comments by someone as yourself who just wants the products to work better get lumped into the same catagory and those others. This kind of thing is going to go on a long as some powerful people in the publishing and finaicial worlds keep sponsoring the anti-Apple spin machine.

Bing,

I have been a fan of Apple almost since the beginning when our firm bought the first Macintosh’s in 1984. My son had an Apple IIe. We noticed early on that Apple usage required less customer support than the DOS based machines, and we tried to enlist Apple executives to provide application development support to us, but they weren’t really keen on supporting corporate America, and over time our support for Apple became untenable, as Microsoft stepped up its corporate support, and we reluctantly went with Windows as our standard operating platform. However at home, I always felt Apple was a better platform for consumers, but again because so many people used Windows at work, they chose Windows for home use. Now that I’m retired I can indulge myself with Apple and not worry anymore about being conversant with two platforms. I think the unease with which some view Apple has to do with the non-conformist culture that Apple has cultivated over the years going back to the famous commercial during the 1984 Superbowl. Plus many computer users tend to dismiss Apple products as being too expensive when that is not true when you consider the entire cost of owning a computer. Although I grant that Apple monitors and memory are overpriced. By the way I loved your article on dealing with financial advisor who tell you never to sell. I ran into that with my advisor and of course when he finally sold all of my holdings, the stock market started going back up.

You can use a USB cable and Apple’s Migration Assistant to transfer data to your new Mac: you don’t need Firewire.

Great article but not sure where I fit in when referring to .
I’ve got a Powerbook G4. It was like the MBA, purchases in the frenzy of Mac World in 2003 when Steve woo’d the crowd with the first 17″ notebook. At the time, I had a Sony Vaio which was taking at least 1-2 days of my life each week trying to keep it and Windows from impacting my work. It died for three days for no apparent reason - perfectly black and unresponsive. Sony’s help desk was useless (can’t say that about the great help I’ve received from Apple and the Genius bar).

So, I’m a switcher. I guess the 2000 lingo for that is a flip-flopper?

I can say that since I’ve been on my Powerbook life has gotten much simpler - it just works day after day with no Viruses or Mcafee or Norton headaches and rarely an OS update that completely disables my machine.

As for Leopard, I do have to say that in the OS X release cycle (with the exception of 10.0 and 10.1) this has been a rather weak effort. We shouldn’t be surprise because Steve said it would be delayed due to the iPhone release and the same developers working on the iPhone mini OS X system as Leopard. Then all the massive criticism and push to make SURE Leopard was released ontime.

So, we go it ontime. It does need some work. However, from what I’ve seen and reported, the bug fixes have been very effective.

Let’s not forget that Apple is at the forefront of the Green movement. They released the first ever LED backlit notebooks. I’ve been waiting on the LED backlit Macbook Pro’s and they just released those.

It seems this fear oriented environment we are currently in has driven people to be fearfully critical of almost anything. Why not drink less caffeine and pause a moment to realize that we are in fact all human beings - quite fallible in fact!

In my opinion, Leopard is a magnificent operating system and the MacBook Air is a niche product, designed for a specific, highly mobile, user.
As for problems with Leopard, with only a couple of exceptions they have been caused by uninformed (as in didn’t follow directions) installation, or existing underlying file problems that were not resolved BEFORE installation.

I have installed Leopard on several hundred Macs without a problem.

congrats.

welcome to the club.

http://machinist.salon.com

MacBook Air has been a joy to work with on every level since I’m used to dragging around a 17″ MacBook Pro to post for the iPhone Savior blog. The battery is absolutely a huge bone job. Lucky if I get two hours surfing online alone. Apple needs to make that right.

printer drivers always lag because they are written by the printer companies. In a few months they will catch up.

I sold my company 5 years ago, ditched the ms dell, and switched to mac. I became an artist and now produce paintings, books, slide shows, prints etc thanks to apple.

Oh yeah my iPhone is incredible. I am using it right now!

Freddothegreat

Hey there, Jason in Austin. I appreciate your views and of course I know that there are mostly rational people out there. I got a smile out of your reference to Dvorak. Is he still around screeding about Macs? I remember his stuff very fondly from the days when I used to be a Windows guy and write for the same magazines that he does. I kind of miss those tirades. Nobody does them better. Unfortunately, the chance of me picking up a PC-based magazine at this point in time is about as great as me subscribing to a periodical targeted to numismatists.

Thanks for both articles. Enjoyed them both. I am lurking for a new laptop and the feedback is useful. Reaching for the full sized Mac Pro laptop feels so old school after picking up an Air. I am also really surprised that Apple skipped the security lock/port on the Air. I don’t want to live in fear that my mac could grow wings and fly away at any moment that my eyes are off of it.

The “Apple Core” is one of the reasons I’ve refrained from getting a Mac. I love Apple products and have several iPods and will get an iPhone once they can be used by anyone other than AT&T. But I don’t want to get a Mac because I’m concerned that I will need to immediately become a conceited a-hole that thinks only things with the apple logo are suitable to exist on the planet.

Hmm… methinks all the recent articles about rabid and overly emotional “Apple-core-true-believers” are a tad overblown. As of this writing there are 9 comments to this post and none of them are rabidly attacking the writer. In my experience, 99% of Apple fans are thoughtful and polite with their disagreement. A written comment can often be misconstrued as an attack due to the lack of emotional context inherent in writing vs. talking face to face. It seems to be a meme among writers who post something negative about Apple that they’re going to get lambasted by the “Apple Faithful”.

Yes, there are nutcases, and I wouldn’t put it past some losers to intentionally hate on writers out of narcissistic fun. But keep in mind that there are basically no bashing comments to this particular post. I think that is a more accurate representation of the Mac community.

We all have problems with our Macs. Some more, some less. I’m a “true believer” who would never even consider a switch. But I’d be totally uninformed and stupidly out of touch if I said that Macs were perfect.

Mr. Bing, glad you love your Mac. Hope you can work around the inevitable problems with it. Hope you can also see around the few nut cases to the vast majority of Mac users out there. You’re a good enough writer not to need the pageviews that result in a Dvorak-like attack on the Mac community.

Uh oh, does that negative comment make me one of them now?

Jason

Leopard does indeed suck. Install Tiger instead. And the MBA battery? Don’t even get me started! Not only is it weaker than watered down coffee, it’s built in and therefore cannot be removed and replaced by the owner. Moronic.

You are over dramatizing this.. i read the blog and yes a few retards here and there but mostly nothing to complain about …

Sorry about any rants you had to endure from the ‘Apple core’.

However, it’s my personal belief that these moronic diatribes are the work of definitely unhinged minds, some of them being ‘double agent’ fanboys from the Windows side!

So, pls don’t assign ALL blame to the ‘real Apple core’!

Thanks and Regards

That’s not the only thing that blows about Leopard either…

Do I use it? Yes.
Do I think it could be improved in 1001 ways? Yes.
Do I think it has many things that are big steps forward when compared to Tiger? Yes.
Do i think it has some things which are distinct steps backward when compared to Tiger? Yes.

Have they driven me away yet? No.
Does the potential to drive me away exist if they do enough bad things? Yes.

Does Apple know all of this? Yes. And this is why they continue to put out great products - they listen to what people are saying both negative and positive and translate that information into useful changes in future revisions of their products.

Now if only we could get the knee-jerks to recognize that constructive criticism indeed does exist…

Agreed. My MBA has not met my expectations (or Apple’s) regarding battery life. But I love it none-the-less!
However - I have 5 Macs ranging in age from 5 years onld to 2 months. Run Leopard on all and have seen not printer issues with my WiFi networked printers. They just always work. JB.

No need for the political commentary, you dolt! Just kidding about the dolt part. Just thought it would be in the spirit of the article. I am serious about the political commentary though. It has no place in a discussion about a computer. Sheesh . .

I agree with you. I am a Mac lover exactly because I am not a geek, do not want chicken feathers in my mouth; nor do I want to entertain geek-gawkers. I want my Mac to do my nerd thinking for me so I can run a business, write novels and all the other fun stuff human beings are put here for. I do not watch Star Trek and never had acne. Ken Campbell

The fact is, Leopard’s printer drivers blow….Here! Here! As a new MacBook owner/user I have had endless problems with my new HP wireless printer….and here I thought it was user error…..