MacBook Air

[tkam]

802.11n is a big advantage. 54mb/sec is REALLY slow for drive access. Even 802.11N is slow for drive access tho. I have trouble explaining to people at work why their writes over 4gb/sec links are slow

Agreed 802.11n is a pretty big advantage over g. I have a "draft-n" wireless AP and with WPA2 enabled max speeds I see are about 6-7MB/s.

[saint.panda]

I think the markup for the 1TB version is pretty big, something like a $80-100 premium. Cheaper to get the 500GB and hook up another 500GB to the Time Capsule via USB.

I also need to find a way to order from the US. I hate Apple for charging the same in euro as it costs in dollars, which gives me a close to 50% price difference. Even after customs, that's still cheaper. Maybe wait for ebay or something.

[grawk]

For that matter you could get the airport extreme and plug in whatever drive you want. This is just a one box solution that apple will support all the parts, for people who don't want to mess with multiple vendors etc.

[tyrion]

For that matter you could get the airport extreme and plug in whatever drive you want. This is just a one box solution that apple will support all the parts, for people who don't want to mess with multiple vendors etc.

This is being marketed to me who doesn't want to mess with multiple vendors.

[grawk]

I think it's generally safe to say that if you think it's a reasonable solution to homebrew a solution in computing, the equivalent apple isn't targetted at you. The elegance of MacOS changes that math somewhat, as it's the best unix implementation for user workstations, so it's gotten more widespread, but that doesn't change the fact that iTunes, apple servers, storage solutions, wireless routers, etc aren't aimed at people who enjoy spending their time tweaking how * works. Apples work. You plug them in, you do whatever configuration you feel is appropriate for you, and then you put them away. That makes me the target market, because honestly, I don't want to spend my home computing time doing that. I don't even spend my work computing time doing that anymore. Lots of people don't fit that mold, and apple makes some nods at trying to be the right thing for those people, but for the most part, they're not. It's ok, apple's not insulting you, or their customers. It's just a computer. Or an ipod. Or a network disk.

[mirumu]

I'd second that grawk. I stuff around with computers all day at work be it off the shelf Compaq junk, handbuilt PCs or old Unix servers plus various network & storage devices. On the software side it includes supported Windows installs, supported Linux/Unix installs as well as completely unsupported Linux installs where I end up building custom deb packages or RPMs just to make stuff do what we need. Supporting Oracle products alone can be a nightmare. I do what I can to advocate the purchase of reliable, capable and well supported hardware/software but in my company at least cost often wins out.

When I get home I just don't want to care about any of this. I want something that just works. I'm not saying Apple gear always works or is the most reliable stuff you can buy, but I find that overall the high integration level between their products results in less overall pain on my part and less time wasted. Usually I can turn the devices on, forget about the tech and just spend the time doing what I want to do. To me that's worth the price difference and even a little loss in flexibility. I do have a hand built Windows/Linux PC around too, but since it's a secondary computer and only really used for gaming it doesn't cause much grief.