You can go back further. Every single generation of iMac has been greeted with complaints that there are no expansion slots, you can’t upgrade it, you can’t replace the screen, and in the case of the original iMac it was missing that most vital of peripherals, the 3.5 inch floppy drive.
The tech press, it seems, has a bad record on judging products on criteria you can’t fit on a feature matrix.
Which is a problem, because feature matrices suck. A feature matrix says: “Here is what everyone else is doing. To be competitive you must do the same.” Where’s the differentiation? Where’s the innovation in doing exactly what everyone else does, ticking the boxes, shaving off one or two points in each row so you get the green tick?
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Enter the MacBook Air, a device that is under-powered, has too small a hard drive, has only one USB port, lacks firewire, a replaceable battery, wired ethernet and an optical drive. Sure-fire flop, right? Even those sites willing to give the Air a look have labeled it as a “secondary” machine, only suitable for those rich (or geeky) enough to own more than one Mac. That’s an opinion I can sympathise with because if I were to buy an Air (a distinct possibility), that’s the role it would play.
I have to remind myself, though, that I am not a normal person. Nor are most people who write for tech weblogs. I think the step that Apple is taking with the MacBook Air is much like the one they took when they decided to ship the iMac without a floppy drive. They know where the world is going, and they want to be there first.
