I just had a thought: maybe the next-gen air will feature iOS as opposed to OS X. That might explain the long gap between updates: They're waiting for a good enough version of iOS!
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
iOS on updated Air?
- Thread starter TorontoLRT
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows CE; IEMobile 7.11) Sprint PPC6850SP)
The larger question isn't faithfulness to "what the Air is" ... but rather... can each kind of prospective user find a suitable model?
There is a bit of a void for the relatively mobile worker or person whose mibile work includes "content generating".
Of course, all laptop makers exaggerate battery life. So the perfect Air buyer wants a full Mac O/S, great keyboard, nice screen, great Nvidia graphics... but they're never out of the office for long enough to run down the battery. Or they're OK with schlepping the charger around, and never far from the next outlet.
And they can live with modest memory, because their Air isn't a sole computer.
Such buyers exist... college students if they carry it around, come to mind. But the Air's combination of features and omissions may even fail the college student.
Hank Keys (sp?), a computer consultant with 30 years experience doing a computer radio show, says he sent his daughter to college with a laptop. It turned out that all the kids in the dorm had desktops,, because with 3 roommates and all their friends and acquaintances coming in and out... a laptop can get easily stolen. (And few students on that campus took laptops to classes.) But a heavy desktop wouldn't get stolen.
So... does the MacBook Air have a slot for a cable lock? No. It's so light that it might get carried around sometimes... but sometimes it'll be left in that dorm room.
The Air is like one of those old sports cars whose peculiar mix of features and omissions would elicit a reaction consisting of all of the following: "Great. Super. Nice! Oi. Ahhh. Beautiful! You gotta be kidding, they left THAT out?"
Jobs's policy of -- forget market research, my personal intuition on design will rule supreme." may have worked for certain products better than for others. IMHO the Air is this approach's least successful product, even though it simultaneously something launched as an innovation leader.
The history of design innovation is littered with very interesting designs that don't seem to have succeeded as much as they should have.
Upon closer examination, some of the failed innovations fell short due to "It had this, but it didn't have that", or sometimes it was not publicised much,, and most of the potential buyers never even knew it existed.
But the Air is now just a spec-bump or 2 away from finally -- being emancipated from its cramped memory specs. Double or triple the max. RAM, and double or quadruple the biggest available SSD, and keep the progress at least inching forward on battery life (last bump changed 37 watts to 40; let it gain a quarter pound for that)... and toughen up the case a bit ..... and IMHO they'll sell double, triple or quadruple the number of units they're now selling.
Apple is SO CLOSE to getting this product's design right... it's frustrating for a student of design and innovation to wait and wonder when they will.
Translation: I need it now (bad timing) so I'll get the best one available now... and years from now when I need another, the Air will be a super thing.
The larger question isn't faithfulness to "what the Air is" ... but rather... can each kind of prospective user find a suitable model?
There is a bit of a void for the relatively mobile worker or person whose mibile work includes "content generating".
Of course, all laptop makers exaggerate battery life. So the perfect Air buyer wants a full Mac O/S, great keyboard, nice screen, great Nvidia graphics... but they're never out of the office for long enough to run down the battery. Or they're OK with schlepping the charger around, and never far from the next outlet.
And they can live with modest memory, because their Air isn't a sole computer.
Such buyers exist... college students if they carry it around, come to mind. But the Air's combination of features and omissions may even fail the college student.
Hank Keys (sp?), a computer consultant with 30 years experience doing a computer radio show, says he sent his daughter to college with a laptop. It turned out that all the kids in the dorm had desktops,, because with 3 roommates and all their friends and acquaintances coming in and out... a laptop can get easily stolen. (And few students on that campus took laptops to classes.) But a heavy desktop wouldn't get stolen.
So... does the MacBook Air have a slot for a cable lock? No. It's so light that it might get carried around sometimes... but sometimes it'll be left in that dorm room.
The Air is like one of those old sports cars whose peculiar mix of features and omissions would elicit a reaction consisting of all of the following: "Great. Super. Nice! Oi. Ahhh. Beautiful! You gotta be kidding, they left THAT out?"
Jobs's policy of -- forget market research, my personal intuition on design will rule supreme." may have worked for certain products better than for others. IMHO the Air is this approach's least successful product, even though it simultaneously something launched as an innovation leader.
The history of design innovation is littered with very interesting designs that don't seem to have succeeded as much as they should have.
Upon closer examination, some of the failed innovations fell short due to "It had this, but it didn't have that", or sometimes it was not publicised much,, and most of the potential buyers never even knew it existed.
But the Air is now just a spec-bump or 2 away from finally -- being emancipated from its cramped memory specs. Double or triple the max. RAM, and double or quadruple the biggest available SSD, and keep the progress at least inching forward on battery life (last bump changed 37 watts to 40; let it gain a quarter pound for that)... and toughen up the case a bit ..... and IMHO they'll sell double, triple or quadruple the number of units they're now selling.
Apple is SO CLOSE to getting this product's design right... it's frustrating for a student of design and innovation to wait and wonder when they will.
Translation: I need it now (bad timing) so I'll get the best one available now... and years from now when I need another, the Air will be a super thing.
I would love this. Call it the iPad Pro.
Completely oversimplifying things, it seems like most of the people here that talk about using their Air for work are talking about word processing and spreadsheets. That's about 75 percent of it, in my estimation. Give the iPad a hard keyboard, and you're good to go for most of the MBAs target audience.
An ultralight machine to me, means throwing out everything you don't need. It was extra USB ports and battery life with the original MBA. In this new one, it would be processor hungry OSX. We'd have awesome battery life, a full keyboard, lighter weight, and a totally intuitive interface.
Just awesome!
Bri
Completely oversimplifying things, it seems like most of the people here that talk about using their Air for work are talking about word processing and spreadsheets. That's about 75 percent of it, in my estimation. Give the iPad a hard keyboard, and you're good to go for most of the MBAs target audience.
An ultralight machine to me, means throwing out everything you don't need. It was extra USB ports and battery life with the original MBA. In this new one, it would be processor hungry OSX. We'd have awesome battery life, a full keyboard, lighter weight, and a totally intuitive interface.
Just awesome!
Bri
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows CE; IEMobile 7.11) Sprint PPC6850SP)
An interesting vision... though it depends on the dawn of a greater rationality at Apple, design-wise, about keyboards.
On smaller devices, Apple, going back to the semi-fab Newton which I had (and thru the iPhones and iPad now) seems to be keyboardophobic. Maximum faith is placed in "the screen is everything; it controls everything."
(Ever try to snap a picture with a phone that doesn't have a dedicated button to turn on the camera? By the time you drill down in the menu and get the camera on... often whatever it is you wanted to photograph isn't there any more.)
As I've learned and surmised here, the attraction of the iOS may be in part practical -- it's Apple's, even the chip for it. Other companies can't make it difficult (as Intel is making the next Air difficult, by not letting Nvidia put Intel CPU's in CPU+GPU chipsets). So it would seem just a matter of time until the iOS is expanded enough to make an basic version of the Air.
Would Apple lighten up on its "the screen is everything" dogma, to somehow add one to an iPad, maybe detachable... but together it can function if the situation requires, on a lap? Which the iPad + keyboard dock doesn't quite do? With a better iWork, ('Word'-4-iOS ?), and printing? A big i-Cloud memory storage subscription available, maybe with option to pay once for the device's lifetime? (Sirius sat. radio had/has? a way to buy lifetime subscriptions.)
You're right, there's a space between the iPad and the Air... waiting to be filled by something --- a deluxe iPad-pro, or an Air that is more focussed on what the road warrior type maximally "mobile" worker actually needs.
Though you may be perceived as an apostate in certain circles, if you mention the name 'Air' while discussing such things.
An interesting vision... though it depends on the dawn of a greater rationality at Apple, design-wise, about keyboards.
On smaller devices, Apple, going back to the semi-fab Newton which I had (and thru the iPhones and iPad now) seems to be keyboardophobic. Maximum faith is placed in "the screen is everything; it controls everything."
(Ever try to snap a picture with a phone that doesn't have a dedicated button to turn on the camera? By the time you drill down in the menu and get the camera on... often whatever it is you wanted to photograph isn't there any more.)
As I've learned and surmised here, the attraction of the iOS may be in part practical -- it's Apple's, even the chip for it. Other companies can't make it difficult (as Intel is making the next Air difficult, by not letting Nvidia put Intel CPU's in CPU+GPU chipsets). So it would seem just a matter of time until the iOS is expanded enough to make an basic version of the Air.
Would Apple lighten up on its "the screen is everything" dogma, to somehow add one to an iPad, maybe detachable... but together it can function if the situation requires, on a lap? Which the iPad + keyboard dock doesn't quite do? With a better iWork, ('Word'-4-iOS ?), and printing? A big i-Cloud memory storage subscription available, maybe with option to pay once for the device's lifetime? (Sirius sat. radio had/has? a way to buy lifetime subscriptions.)
You're right, there's a space between the iPad and the Air... waiting to be filled by something --- a deluxe iPad-pro, or an Air that is more focussed on what the road warrior type maximally "mobile" worker actually needs.
Though you may be perceived as an apostate in certain circles, if you mention the name 'Air' while discussing such things.
I actually want a MBA for college. I don't want to lug around a heavy 15" laptop. It's ok now because I'm in high school and I don't need to carry it around that much. I do need portability so a desktop Mac doesn't work with me. I plan on selling my 15" MBP for an iMac or Mac Pro and getting a MBA for classes in college. Who knows? By that time, the MBA hardware would good enough to replace my current MBP so I only need one machine, not two.
The MBA was designed for a traveler in mind, not a creative professional that uses Photoshop. It's a lightweight laptop with a few compromises. It's a barebones Mac. But iOS is completely different. It's a mobile (read smartphone) OS. It's a stripped down version of Mac OS X, which it is based on. Phones don't need certain technologies found in Mac OS X, so Apple took a lot of stuff out, but left key components in. A MBA is still considered a full-fledged Mac and therefore iOS wouldn't work. iOS is designed primarily with touchscreen input. A MBA is still keyboard/trackpad and iOS wouldn't work. The iPhone, iPad and iPod touch all are touchscreen input only devices and iOS works well in these cases albeit with a few cosmetic modifications.
The MBA was designed for a traveler in mind, not a creative professional that uses Photoshop. It's a lightweight laptop with a few compromises. It's a barebones Mac. But iOS is completely different. It's a mobile (read smartphone) OS. It's a stripped down version of Mac OS X, which it is based on. Phones don't need certain technologies found in Mac OS X, so Apple took a lot of stuff out, but left key components in. A MBA is still considered a full-fledged Mac and therefore iOS wouldn't work. iOS is designed primarily with touchscreen input. A MBA is still keyboard/trackpad and iOS wouldn't work. The iPhone, iPad and iPod touch all are touchscreen input only devices and iOS works well in these cases albeit with a few cosmetic modifications.