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Comments on MacBook Air: What Vision Is This?
Oh, yes, you can buy your own MacBook Air and take it home. But why are you going to? (Read
the complete story)
| "I think that is a very thoughtful and articulate summary of what the MacBook Air represents. So many Luddites are clinging to artifacts, and while there is some value in them, most of the time you are dead on, we just want the content.
Less packaging, fewer objects. Its what the world needs." ( 2/1/2008 4:19:55 PM) |
| "It may be a step in the right direction, but it has to be fast and high fidelity, which is isn't truly yet, if it is to replace my experiences with "things". Being portable is mildly helpful in that regard.
I can't write in the margin of my Kindle--yet." (dug 2/2/2008 7:16:04 PM) |
| "Portability comes second place to accessibility. Most of the information available to us isn't remotely portable (it's housed on huge server arrays which are for practical purposes immobile), but to which we have constant access through a sophisticated medium of communication. The only artefact which needs to be portable is the one which provides accessibility.
Perhaps the McAir is part of a new trend shifting back to the much maligned 'thin client' of the older days. This would be in keeping with the old sci-fi vision of people walking around with tiny electronic tablets which gave them access to the huge storage and processing capacity of much larger machines (Asimov's 'Multivac' for example). As PDAs/Smartphones grow larger and 'laptops' grow smaller, they seem to be converging on this ideal." (Fortigurn 2/3/2008 4:24:48 PM) |
| "All good points - I hadn't thought about less packaging, but that's absolutely right. Re dug's remarks - I was kind of hoping apple would introduce a multi-touch tablet that was 8x11. The home row for the virtual keyboard would appear when (and where) you put your fingers down. You'd need a stylus of some sort, though, if you wanted to jot things. I hate styli - they always get lost." (Bill Christensen 2/3/2008 4:51:11 PM) |
| "There are plenty of sfnal references; for some reason, I liked the article better without them. But, consider the Newspad (Clarke, 1968), transmit paper (Herbert, 1972), the mediatron and runcible (Stephenson, 1995) and the touch tablet (Bear, 2003)." (Bill Christensen 2/3/2008 5:07:53 PM) |
| "This reminds me of an experience I had on a bus here in my city; A young woman sitting next to me was writing what appeared to be notes on e-book technology in two columns "Advantages" and "Disadvantages". I started a converstaion with her on this, and made a comment that with the correct software and desire, that information in such books could be manipulated and changed to reflect new political 'realities' or even just to disguise corporate incompetence; Making history maleable, just as in Orwell's "1984". She was impressed at this thought and thanked me for it, then wrote down "Censorship-Chnaging data at will across all users".
In the "Advantages" column.
Anyone scared yet? Or are some of us so bored of the past that we want it erased?" (DFStuckey 2/7/2008 3:34:30 PM) |
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