You think that Intel won't sell this to anyone besides Apple? No, I'm betting in exchange for covering a bit of their development costs (and continuing to use Intel on everything), Apple got first dibs on it. Expect this kind of stuff to show up in Dell/HP/Lenovo products in 9-18 months. They'll probably not be as thin or as tightly integrated, but they will have the benefit of 9 extra months of watching ThinAir Macs fail in the field.
We don't really know for certain whether the Macbook Air will fail of not, only time will tell. The typical high price and low feature count does not help it's cause. Whether you like Apple or not, they are prepared to take risks with their new products. You don't see that often in the Windows based world.
Actually, by failures I meant individual product failures - specifically from thermal or torque issues. What happens when someone bends the board a little bit each time they stick it in their backpack, and over time you wear out some connections. What happens when you leave the laptop running for days on end under a blanket? Tight physical integration has its costs...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Brad @ Jan 18th 2008 4:25PM
You think that Intel won't sell this to anyone besides Apple? No, I'm betting in exchange for covering a bit of their development costs (and continuing to use Intel on everything), Apple got first dibs on it. Expect this kind of stuff to show up in Dell/HP/Lenovo products in 9-18 months. They'll probably not be as thin or as tightly integrated, but they will have the benefit of 9 extra months of watching ThinAir Macs fail in the field.
adrian @ Jan 18th 2008 6:13PM
@Brad
We don't really know for certain whether the Macbook Air will fail of not, only time will tell. The typical high price and low feature count does not help it's cause. Whether you like Apple or not, they are prepared to take risks with their new products. You don't see that often in the Windows based world.
Brad @ Jan 18th 2008 7:46PM
Actually, by failures I meant individual product failures - specifically from thermal or torque issues. What happens when someone bends the board a little bit each time they stick it in their backpack, and over time you wear out some connections. What happens when you leave the laptop running for days on end under a blanket? Tight physical integration has its costs...