Yeah, that's right. I'm actually composing this blog post on my flight from LHR to SIN. kinda awkward, having a 15" screen on your lap, being squashed by the person in front everytime he tries to push his seat back even further. Perhaps that's why Apple used a 12" iBook for an ad of a guy using his laptop on the plane. Much smaller, so you can actually put it on the foldable table, even in economy class.
I just want to comment on the screen size of laptops. What, in your opinion, is the perfect screen size for a laptop / computer? Because we know that if the screen is too small, then there's no point in having a laptop - you'll be squinting half the time, and using an external monitor the rest of the time, which makes your laptop simply a Mac mini with a heads-up display. On the opposite extreme, having an overly large screen tend to equate to unnecessary extras - extra bulk, extra weight, all the things that you don't want in a laptop. For example: you can't use a 17" anywhere realistically speaking, other than in a graphics studio, then perhaps. Because if you look in the case of the Macs, you'll realise that the bigger your laptop, the better its performance capabilities (or sometimes, battery) tend to be. With a bigger screen, you increase the footprint, and hence, the volume available to pack in more lithium polymer or hotter graphics chips / CPUs.
I've always loved the 15" MacBook Pro. It's always been the model I prefer in all the revisions - I didn't like the Air because I felt it's underpowered; The MacBook 13" used to be made of plastic, and the screen was not up to standard as the rest of the product line; the 17" is not the right size.
What is the ideal laptop size, then? Something you can still use (perhaps in Economy Class on a plane), but still have the processing power to boot. Maybe I'm being picky and anal here, but could it be the 13", only with the internals of a 15" MBP? The 13" is small in my opinion, but if Apple could bump the pixel density up to 1440x900 on the 13", and perhaps add a 9600M GT, that would be a very nice machine to use anywhere - in someone's apartment, or on seat 51E on a long-haul flight. After all, I don't really see the point in an 8-hour battery life. Power plugs are everywhere, why not lower that number to 6, and add a graphics chip that you can use for dual-monitoring? Really, I think this might work, as long as they can control the internal thermal environment.
One more thing I want to comment on is the MacBook Air. I tried to hold one just now whilst window shopping in Heathrow. It's a beautifully designed and shaped machine. I'm seriously considering getting the Air as my next laptop, for when I get to university. However, there's certain issues which I think still needs to be worked out first. The RAM - 2GB - should be upped to at least 4. The HDD/SSD capacity needs to be upped much higher - at least 250/256GB respectively. I can't accept the fact that the Air has as much space as an iPod classic - that means I can't have anything on the Air other than music if my collection does, indeed, fill the iPod. The third issue if ports - The Air needs more ports. Specifically, it needs a FW800, a 2nd USB, and audio in. I think it's possible to accommodate space for these extra ports. I really don't mind a little more bulk in that machine, as long as I can still use it as my main computer. I don't mind losing the Ethernet and DVD drives - those are so rarely used nowadays, anyway.
What do you think?
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