What Apple should have done, by ASUS

10 May 2008, 17:30

Article first appeared here, and was edited by Luke.

With all the hype surrounding the Macworld Expo and coverage Stevie's keynote has produced, you could be forgiven for believing that the Macbook Air is the be-all and end-all of the petite laptop market.

Sure, its going to be a solid product with all the traits of expert engineering that makes Apple systems highly buyable even when sold at their higher-than-norm premium price point. The MagSafe power cable, the magnetic screen hinge, the solid hardware-software integration are all going to be there. However, the key selling point appears to just be a kudos factor that probably won't affect the average consumer - the thinness. Whilst it might be an excellent bragging right when it comes to your mates in the office, I fail to see how this translates to making the Macbook Air a fundamentally better product. It will take up marginally less room in your bag (and you won't need those Firewire devices or ethernet cable due to lack of ports) and weigh less, but will it make it more usable? Probably not - it still won't fit properly on an aircraft tray table.

This knowledge and the intense reality distortion field a Stevenote produces have hyped the Macbook Air - but we're already beginning to see the backlash from differing opinions. Aside from the obvious speed hit Apple have taken by using the tiny iPod-style 1.8" disk (although the much faster SSD is available for $999 more), and the sparsity of ports available, the main problem I see is still the size.

The solution should have been to make the form factor smaller, not just take the Macbook to Weight Watchers. This would mean that you could fit pretty much all the standard ports onto the product and still make it lighter. With all the dimensions practically the same as a normal laptop, can it justify the lack of functionality the thinness apparently necessitates.

One company has done this, and it's all looking rather good. ASUS, better known for making motherboards, has produced the "Eee". Now, I said the "Wii" was a stupid name, and I've not lived it down since Nintendo hit gold with that product. I fear I'm going to make the same mistake here - Eee is a ridiculous name.

This subnotebook is pretty darned small. The 7" screen is in a 225 × 165 × 350mm case and weighs just 0.92kg. Lets compare this to the Macbook Air with a 13.3" screen sitting in a 227 x 324 x 194mm case, weighing 1.36Kg. The main problem with this tiny screen is that it can only support upt o 800x480 resolution, and this falls short of Windows XP's 800x600 minimum stated requirement. This is not to say that the machine can't run XP, it can, but with the incredibly annoying screen scrolling.

Processing juice comes via a 900Mhz Intel Celeron chip (clocked to 800mhz on the lowest spec model), with upto 1Gb of RAM. Storage is provided by 4 or 8Gb solid state disks. You'll probably have more storage on your iPod, unfortunately. Connectivity is via all the usual suspects. Somehow ASUS have managed to cram 3 USB ports onto this sucker, alongside a MMC/SD card reader, 10/100 ethernet, mic and headphone jacks and a VGA port. 802.11b/g also features, and is probably going to be the main connection method you'll use, to take advantage of the small device's size.

The solution to the screen scrolling problem is to bundle the hardware with a version of Linux (Xandros) with rather useful versions of OpenOffice, Firefox, Skype, and links to freebie online services such as Wikipedia and Google Docs. This is all tied together with a clean, custom, tab-based UI. All very impressive, and excellent for the average home user. An enthusiast-class user will however have it all wiped as soon as the machine is unpacked and their favorite flavor of Linux installed in a jiffy without, it should be noted, paying the Windows 'tax'.

Speaking of money - did I mention that these beauties cost from as little as 215 GBP or 300 USD? Its not a fair comparison, but the Macbook Air starts at 1200 GBP or 1800 USD. Little wonder ASUS have shipped 300,000 in the last year.

The big news however is that ASUS plan to sell several million units in 2008, by making an updated versions of this device. In what must be a design and manufacturing nightmare they are going to be producing 7, 8 and 8.9" models the biggest of which will apparently feature a touch screen. The fan from the older range will be removed, due to the use of more efficient Merom-class Intel processors, resulting in a 36% drop in power consumption, and we can expect a hike in SSD size. A version of the machine with WiMax also demoed recently. Presumably ASUS will have noticed the Windows screen resolution problem and will take action on that front.

Expect these puppies out in April, beware Apple.

Jason Cartwright RSS Feed

about

Jason is a web developer living in London, working for Google and Ferrago Ltd.

links

me

work

colophon