avoiding the cult, part III

With the latest in the “avoiding the cult” series (I, II) I want to keep you all up-to-date on the MacBook Air.

ArsTechnica has published a review of the SSD version of the MacBook Air. The question they ask is, “is it worth another $1300?” Without even having to read it, you can safely assume “no.”

However, after reading the comparison, complete with benchmarks galore, it is very easy to see just how pointless it is to get an Air. The battery life is weak, it is slow, and doesn’t begin to stack up to a MacBook or MacBook Pro, even though it is between two and three times more expensive than the former, and more expensive than the latter with a SSD.

Near the end of the article, I noticed something funny (not ha-ha-funny):

The $1,300 question is whether the SSD is worth the extra cash. The answer seems to be no. I experienced only moderate gains in battery life and not very noticeable speed differences. The one major benefit of the SSD model is that it doesn’t cause the same types of slowdowns as the HDD model during times of high disk activity, and that’s certainly a huge plus. Speedy read times are great, too, but they are balanced out by pokey write times.

Still, even if it’s more usable, it’s hard to justify the huge price difference for the SSD model. If you’ve got an extra $1,300 to blow and, for some reason, haven’t just bought a second computer with it, perhaps the SSD model is for you. For anyone else looking to buy an Air, the HDD model appears to provide the most bang for the buck.

Um.

How about the fact that the HDD version is not worth $1,800? I imagine that if someone is stupid enough to throw away $1,800 on a “thin” poorly performing version of a MacBook that they would be stupid enough to throw away another $1,300 to get a SSD regardless of any concern for “most bang for the buck.” You heard it here folks: if you want the most bang for your buck, fuck the MacBook Air and just get a vanilla MacBook instead. Get two of them. If you want to throw away $3,100 get three and give two away to people who need them.

The MacBook Air is not marketed to people with common sense, it is marketed to people — no, idiots — who have no idea of the worth or value of a computer. It is marketed to mindless Apple fanbois with a home-made rubber replica of Steve Jobs’s junk in their mouths.