Idée Fixins

The MacBook Air looks gorgeous. And though the performance of past Airs — and being realistic about how mobile I really am in a week — gives me pause, none of those concerns are serious enough to stop me from buying one as my next computer.

Electronics being smaller is almost always significantly more important than it seems while you’re looking at a product online.

I remember a friend mocking the first iPod Mini when it first came out, incredulous that anyone thought the iPod — which already managed to cram 1000 songs into your pocket! — needed to be any smaller. Have you seen one of the original iPods lately? After you experience a mini version, the previous full size feels cumbersome and ridiculous and unecessary. 

That said, I’ve got a unresolvable problem with the Air: storage space.

And this problem of mine is really Apple’s problem. I blame them for two reasons.

One, I need storage space as a direct result of Apple’s brilliant digital hub strategy. I’ve got a 500GB hard drive in my MacBook Pro filled up a little more than halfway right now:

• 69.7 GB — iPhoto library (Also to blame for that: our friends who bought us a great Canon DSLR for our wedding) 
• 49.8 GB — Music
• 34.7 GB — Video projects (Final Cut Pro and iMovie stuff, not video podcasts or TV shows or anything like that)

Those three categories total about 150 gigs — more than all but the largest MacBook Air hard drive, and too big for any 11” model.

Apple created an OS and great software that inspired me to store all of my photos and music on my computer. And because they created amazing video-creation software that I use for my job from time to time, to huge-GB effect.

Two: Apple should have seen this coming and solved it by now. I know there are perennial rumors about them working on iTunes for the cloud, and endless speculation about their NC data center, and they bought Lala, and all the rest. But they haven’t delivered yet.

There’s one obvious solution, though I don’t know if it’s the best solution, and I don’t think there’s any chance they’ll actually do it: A home media server that works as easily as the Time Capsule. It could be based on syncing parts of the master library (like laptop -> iPhone relationship now) as well as streaming (like the laptop/iPhone/iPad -> Apple TV relationship). I see a need for both, unless they manage to make streaming work anywhere — not just over the same wireless network.

Of course, the other way to do it is entirely over the cloud. But while that might work with music, where 99% of my songs are copies of something that Apple already has in its servers, that won’t do the trick with photos or video. And I still spend enough time away from wifi or in bad-3G areas that I’m not comfortable having none of my media on the computer I’m carrying with me. I’m hoping for some sort of “check-out / sync” option as well as robust streaming.

But so far, Apple hasn’t come close to solving the problem.

So for now, I’ll just keep putting the MacBook Air in my cart on store.apple.com and then taking it out again every few days. But as soon as the 11” model has a 250-500 GB hard drive, and/or Apple comes out with a serious, modern media-server or cloud-based media organization solution, I’m clicking buy.