A comment in my recent post about letting the air out of Air got me thinking about some of the design decisions Apple have made with their new laptop.
Digital Distribution
A commenter called skippy said:
The lack of optical drive strikes me as a clever mechanism to further strengthen iTunes’ dominance in the “legal MP3 sales” market, and to further drive Apple customers to rely on the iTunes music store. I know a lot of people purchase iTunes songs, burn them to CD, then re-rip them to MP3 format for use on non-iPod devices. The Apple Air will effectively put an end to that practice for its users. Certainly not the biggest deal in the world, but I think it’s a sufficiently interesting wrinkle to merit a comment.
He’s absolutely right, and it goes beyond ripping music. The other main use for optical drives is watching movies, and what else did Apple announce? Their (US only) movie rental service.
In the same post I criticised their Remote Disk offering, commented how easy apt-get made software management for Linux users, and summed it up with:
If Apple is serious about digital distribution (and everything indicates they are) then they need to address this shortcoming.
In hindsight of course they are serious about digital distribution, but for media not software (yet). Remote Disk is just the smoke-and-mirrors to help push people toward the iTunes store.
Wired vs. Wireless
Another commenter – Janne – said:
But no ethernet? Only wireless? This is supposed to be a travel notebook. Sure, wireless is common, but so are wired ports (especially at hotels). And you may well prefer wired over wireless given the choice anyway; less connection troubles, higher speed.
I never saw the lack of wired networking as a shortcoming as almost all my devices are wireless, and everywhere I’ve travelled I’ve used WiFi. Considering skippy’s comment though made me wonder if this omission wasn’t just because of size/space/power, but also because Apple want you to use (and buy) WiFi. Although overshadowed by the Air, their Time Capsule product looks very nice (especially if you are a Time Machine user, but it seems to work as networked storage if you don’t) and it was announced as a wireless device. Sure it has gigabit ethernet in there, but all their marketing pushes the WiFi. You have to look at the Tech Specs before you even see wired networking mentioned.
Sealing the deal
Whilst I don’t believe for one second that either of the above were the main drivers for such decisions – I’m sure it really was about size, weight and power – but as added benefits that tie in with Apple’s goals I’m sure they helped seal the deal.
Tags: air, Apple, design, digital distribution, macbook, media, time capsule