Superbowl = Lame

Out of the 4 possibilities of a Superbowl, the one that ended up happening has to be the least interesting.

Giants-Chargers: See which QB is better after the whole draft deal from a few years ago.
Packers-Patriots: Potentially the best QB of all time (Farve) against potentially the best QB of all time(Brady)
Packers - Chargers: Actually I guess this one isn't very interesting either. But I hate the Patriots.

I guess I just hate the Patriots. I hate their surly coach. I hate Junior Seau. I hate Wes Welker. As a Dolphin fan, i hate that 80% of the fins ended up on the Patriots and they thrive. I think a lot of that has to do with crappy coaching that the fins have had over the last few years, and I hope that Parcells changes that, although it seems like he is running the organization like Bush runs the country. He's getting all his buddies jobs, and that usually means trouble. But I liked the Saban hiring, I liked the Cameron hiring. And I was way off on them, so maybe I'm wrong about Parcells too.

I kind of went on a tangent there I suppose... but yeah. The Superbowl is lame to me this year. I think it's obvious who is going to win. They just played a few months ago. I'll be rooting against the Pats which I've been doing all season, and that hasn't worked very well, but who knows.

I'm tired of hearing people complain about the Mac Book Air

Just a little background as we get started here on the macbook air. Let's go back a year ago when the iPhone was announced. Bloggers everywhere began attacking it's shortcomings. While I didn't have a blog at that time, I expressed my displeasure for it as well.

It had quite a few shortcomings. The glaring one to me was it's lack of 3g. Considering I already had a phone with 3g, and cingular was offering phones for free with 3g, I didn't understand why apple would skip that little antenna. The claimed it was for battery life, but with a full size touch screen, I assumed you would be charging it every night anyway. After benchmarks came out, I noticed that this omission wasn't really that bad of a decision. Considering two iPhones next to each other, one using wifi, and the other using edge were able to view pages in the same amount of time. Turns out the bottleneck isn't with the data network, but with the slow cellphone processor. The only way you would really see a change in speed is if you were tethering the phone, which we all know is a no-no according to AT&T.

• Other complaints were the fact it was tied to AT&T. (A must for GSM phones that don't want to be on T-Mobile) a lot of people don't understand how phone networks work, and would like to think that a phone made to work on Verizon would work anywhere else in the world outside of America.
  
• No replaceable battery but not a surprise as it's the Apple way.
  
• No Physical keyboard was another huge complaint. By myself as well, as my last 3 cellphones have had full keyboards (Treo 650, Samsung Blackjack, HTC Mogul)
• Cost. People bought a RAZR for $50, why would they pay 8 times that for an iPhone?
  

What I am getting at is apparently, everyone was wrong. Everyone except Apple. The iPhone is still selling ridiculously and everyone wants one. I bought a touch, and the interface really is terrific. I've jailbroken it, allowing me to install the maps, mail, weather applications that Apple now wants me to pay $20 for. (No Thanks) And for what it's worth, it's a great little device.

The same kind of people are now out, and again (it seems worse this time) are complaining about the new product released by Apple, the MacBook Air. The complaints seem eerily similar. Complaints about no replaceable battery, cost, the omission of different wireless networks. Apparently people wanted Apple to put a 3G antenna in it, which would of course give them another thing to complain about as the laptop would be tied to Cingular, and you would have to pay Cingular's ridiculously high data fees to use it. One thing I will agree with, is Apple seems to think that every city is like San Fransisco with WiFi all over the place, and that simply isn't the case. I always struggle to find a connection to WiFi in Baltimore, but I think it makes more sense than including extra hardware that would thicken the laptop that many people wouldn't use because they would have to pay monthly for it. A solution to this problem is bluetooth tethering to a cellphone if your cellphone company allows you to. (Sprint does) Allowing me access to the web from anywhere, just by hitting a button on my cellphone. Plus Sprint is fast. Much faster than Cingular.

It seems as with the iPhone, people are skipping the positives and constantly pointing out the things Apple, "shoulda" inculded. Insisting that an optical drive is a necessity, considering that I used my optical drive on my laptop frequently when it was my only computer, but don't think I have opened it since I got a desktop. I do not think Apple is marketing this as a desktop replacement. If this is your first Apple computer, or only computer, I'm sure you would be more compelled to get the cheaper macbook, or for a desktop replacement, the macbook pro. Either of those computers would be much better suited for someone like that. If you are a graphic artist and you want to do animations on the go, it's not the computer for you, but you probably wouldn't be looking for a portable solution in the first place.

I say portable and not ultra-portable because I don't believe this is an ultra portable. However I've used ultra-portables, and they are not for me. The screen is just too small to see anything, and if I actually wanted to write a paper on it, I would go blind. Plus most ultra-portables run Windows, which out of the box doesn't have a solution for multiple desktops, which in my mind is a necessity when working on such a small screen.

I've heard people complain about a bunch of other problems with it, but I haven't heard many people praise what Apple has done, which surprises me. People will complain about everything.

I go over most of the complaints I hear, and then ask you a question before you continue to bash the product.

• You can't remove the battery. It has a 5 hour battery life with WiFi on. How many times have you changed out your laptop battery since you got it. Actually removed the battery and put another one in it's place? My answer? Zero. I've never done this. According to Apple's site, if the battery goes dead when the warranty is up, it will cost $129 for the battery and be installed in a matter of minutes free of charge.
• No Optical drive. If this isn't your only computer what do you use the optical drive for? Installing applications, Apple has you covered with the remote disc application. Get music on your laptop, pull your music over the network from your desktop. Watch movies? rip movies to your desktop and handbrake them and get them that way. (I am in no way recommending renting a movie from i-tunes and paying a ridiuclous price for something that shouldn't cost half that price. The only way I can see this as a benefit is if you are in a hotel and you wanna see a movie, becuas eI know how much hotels charge to rent a movie over their TV system)
• Only 1 USB port. What are you dragging around with you that you need more than one? thumb-drive or external hard drive? that's one port. mouse? get a bluetooth mouse or unplug it when you need to use the hard drive. It's not like these things are running windows 98 and you have to reboot when you unplug the mouse. Plus if you are using this for the portability, you shouldn't be lugging around a bunch of peripherals anyway. That's not the point of this.
• No Firewire. If you plan on editing movie clips on your MacBook Air, shoot yourself.
• Same footprint as the macbook, I want smaller in footprint not in weight/thickness. Then get the macbook. footprint wise, if you go smaller you get a smaller screen size, making it more difficult to work, in my opinion.
• Too expensive. Compare it to the Sony which has worse graphics, smaller screen, and a slower processor for more expensive. While I agree that 3k for a laptopis ridiculous, a quick search on newegg shows how much solid state drives cost. I'll probably get the ipod hard drive anyway because of that.
• Not enough hard drive. Again, this baffles me. People say it's too expensive, and then want a larger solid state drive. I think one of my main gripes is that I want a SMALLER solid state drive. it would make costs lower, and again, this isn't my only computer, I'm using it to take notes in class and code some coldfusion pages. I have a networked hard drive to store files I'm not using. I would have loved a 32GB drive.
  

What I'm getting at is, the people who bashed the iPhone (and I was one of them) were way off base. The iPhone has been ridiculously successful and there is no reason to think that the MacBook Air won't be either. I'll let you know either way, because I plan on buying one after I'm able to use one in person to make sure it's sturdy enough. Because all this is null and void if it falls apart if I fart with it in my lap.