MacBook Air a balanced package

Stephen Withers
Friday, 18 January 2008 05:21

Opinion and Analysis

A (non-iTWire) colleague has questioned Apple's wisdom in fitting the MacBook Air with 2G of soldered-in RAM with no upgrade capability.

My iMac has 3G of memory, of which 0.9G is free or  inactive despite running Activity Monitor, Backup, EyeTV, Firefox, Google Desktop, iSync, iTunes, JunkBroom, Entourage 2008, Word 2008, Preview, Safari, Shades, Skype, Sophos AntiVirus and TextEdit.

A typical mobile user would most likely have fewer programs running at once and therefore 2G should be fine. Sure, there are some programs that soak up lots of memory, but are you going to use them on a MacBook Air?

What the critics seem to have overlooked is Apple's gift for achieving balance in its products.

The hard drive is on the small side (and the solid state disk is even smaller), so it's not going to be very practical to run VM software such as Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion - how many gigabytes would you need to devote to its virtual disk? And that's a common reasons for needing more than 2G of RAM. There's always Boot Camp, but again, disk space would be an issue.

The relatively slow processors available in the MacBook Air mean this is an everyday computer (web, email, word processing, presentations, etc), not a platform for applications  such as Photoshop and Final Cut Pro that need a lot of grunt, so there's less need for big disks and lots of RAM. It also helps with battery life.

A lack of FireWire ports also implies no video work, so that removes another reason for a large hard disk. (Yes, I know some video cameras are USB.) While some people prefer FireWire to USB for attaching external drives for performance reasons, we're not talking about a high-performance computer.