Pleiades's Profile

I hacked a Lenovo S10 with Mac OS X where everything works except for sleep and wired Ethernet. It's pretty cool, but I don't think I'll ever use it as anything other than a experiment. I'll admit it's a kick to see the Apple logo coming up on a Windows machine, but is it too much of a maintenance headache? Normal patching becomes a potential nightmare. Just going to 10.5.6 broke a ton of things that had to be fixed, including keyboard, trackpad, and display resolution. 10.5.7 will likely do the same. I have no idea whether the next Software Update will make everything I've done worthless. While I don't mind doing that as an exercise in "hey, I can build a Hackintosh!" but as a user machine, no thanks. I'll stick with my MBP.

I wouldn't be surprised in the least if the main buyers of the MBA are women. I've noticed over the years that women tend to value size, weight, and portability over everything and that includes performance and screen resolution. Men tend to have the belief that bigger is better and would trend towards the 17" MBP rather than the lightweight MBA. The women in our office almost all have tiny ultra-portables weighing three pounds or less while not a single man in our office has one. In fact some of the men in the office have huge 10+ pound Windows laptops with 17" screens. On of the primary requirements of the women are that the laptop must fit in their shoulder bags. The only problem I see with the MBA and its target audience is that it might be TOO big. Being only marginally smaller in dimensions than the MacBook, its weight and coolness factor may not be a good enough incentive. I think this is where Steve missed the mark. He's a guy so he made the choice of the bigger screen, not realizing that his target market considers that way down the list of priorities for the ultra-portable market. My wife, who is seriously considering a MBA made that comment to me that it's probably too big and that soured it in her eyes.