How much is two pounds worth to you? Why? Because that’s what it amounts to. 2lbs lighter and a 1/3 of an inch shorter. Is that what you expect from a sub notebook?

13.3 is nothing special to the Macbook line and I would argue that the loss in poundage and abilities doesn’t even equate to the cost and product.

Considering the stats of Apple’s existing line of laptops, it appears they may have been a little preoccupied with lightening the load than creating a worthwhile sub-notebook option for the consumer.

I’m going to call it! The “ooowww’s and aaahhh’s” will not survive the pricetag once the dust of niftiness has settled. At least not without some revisions. Of course I’m not the only one to bitch and moan, but hear me out.

From a student/young professional P.O.V. I think my Macbook Pro is wrapped up in unnecessarily glitzy bells and whistles, and not entirely essential at school or the workplace. Now, as I don’t discriminate, I’ve been a proud owner of a pair of Macbooks in my day, white and black. And with max RAM, they pulled their weight through the endless trials across the east coast that I put them through. At 5lbs, I wouldn’t call them fatties. Even with power supply and such, it’s not a burdensome computer. Even until we parted, other than a splintering plastic chassis and an occasionally searing body, I had very few qualms. Refurbished and packed with RAM from ebay these babies barely ran me 1,200 a piece. RAM being crucial.

If we got this package in a 12 inch, I think we might be talking, but now we’ve got an anorexic MacBook with a couple tricks.

For one, two types of people actually utilize the backlit keyboard. Powerpoint presenters and lonely undergrads searching for a rewind button in the dark. (Too suggestive?)

The implementation of this Multi-Touch trackpad seems natural and I welcome it, but the trackpad gestures used with Multi-Touch just seem inevitable for laptop use. Shouldn’t we just be seeing an OS update for this? Please correct me if wrong.

Of course it’ll weigh less if you take out the optical drive! But why is that better?

In a world of thumbdrives you might think a DVD Burner is expendable, not so. You’ll be surprised how important that drive will become at work, when you left it home the first time.

It’s generally the case that IT doesn’t “get” Macs and they have to result to that wayward driver disc at the bottom of their file cabinet. You know you’ll hate yourself when you leave that drive at home, or when you find that the PCs around have administratively locked out your Remote Disk. Ever try to install Firefox on your work PC and find that you CAN’T!

Even Remote Disk doesn’t allow for burning and requires a disk to be installed on conveniently located and accessible computers. But yes, it is a cool trick if it works.

Just some thoughts.

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