“Vocal pre-release blogger-bashers are terrible predictors of a product’s success or failure,” David Pogue writes for The New York Times.
For example: Apple’s MacBook Air. “When it came to public pre-opinion, I knew I had another iPhone on my hands. Here it was, another Apple product with a stunning and sexy design, gorgeous software — and several missing standard features,” Pogue writes. “(In the Air’s case, those features included a removable battery, an Ethernet jack, a FireWire jack and a built-in DVD drive.)”
“So confident was I that the spec-peepers would dump on this machine, I actually tried to pre-empt them in my review. I tried to explain that looks, size, shape, fit and finish actually matter, actually affect the pleasure you get from a machine,” Pogue writes. “Needless to say, my tactic didn’t work. The feature counters blew right past my attempts to describe the differentness of this machine and dumped on it.”
“I have no idea what the Air’s sales are like, so I can’t yet say that the blogger-bashers were wrong again. I do know, however, that the Air has precisely the same effect on people (who actually *see it*) as the iPhone did: they’re awestruck. They want to hold it, to touch it,” Pogue reports. “After having used Apple’s loaner review unit for a couple of weeks, I reached over to pick up my existing Mac laptop, the five-pound MacBook. After the Air, it felt like a piece of Soviet Army field equipment. When I tried to pick it up one-handed, I thought I’d break my wrist.”
Pogue reports, “So that’s it: I bought an Air for myself.”
“I’ll repeat my advice from the original review: this machine doesn’t make a great primary computer, thanks to its smallish hard drive,” Pogue reports. “Otherwise, though, I’ve lived and flown with this machine for a month, presented nine talks on it, and have not missed its missing features one iota. It’s plenty fast and capacious as a second machine.”
Much more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “klapka” for the heads up.]