Fixing The Air #3: The Ports

As you undoubtedly know, the Air has a single USB port, a single micro-DVI port, and a stereo headphone jack. No ethernet. No FireWire. No ExpressCard/34 slot.

Each with it's own ramifications, problems, and solutions.

And as we saw in Fixing the Air #2, this paucity of ports and the desire to create the "world's thinnest notebook" lead in turn to other design decisions, again each with its own issues.

So let's turn our attention to the Case of the Missing Ports.

To be fair about it, let's start by reiterating Apple's position, in the the Air is designed to be primarily a wireless machine. Hence many of the Apple's solutions (and ours) revolve around the Air's relatively fast 802.11n WiFi circuitry.

First among these is Time Capsule, announced during the same keynote as the Air itself. Time Capsule is basically a AirPort Extreme, married to an internal 500GB or 1TB hard drive. Plop one down anywhere in your house or office, and the Air has instant, wireless access to all of that data.

And Time Capsule fixes the "write commit" issues which continue to plague the current Airport Extreme, which means that it can be also used for Time Machine backups.

Time Capsule (and the Airports) also support printer sharing, which means you can plug your USB-based printer into one and also access it from anywhere on your wireless network, again sparing the Air's single precious USB connector.

The same goes for wireless streaming to a set of speakers, enabled by plugging them into an Express.

In fact, for over a year I used a 17" MacBook Pro is just this wireless "docking" configuration, the only physical connection being the MagSafe power cord.

But as we've reported before, all isn't a bed of roses in Apple's wonderful wireless world, with the main problem being that Apple has yet to upgrade the Express to 802.11n. And the Extreme doesn't support AirTunes music streaming (no audio port).

Leaving one with a choice (or no choice, really), as trying to do any serious backup or data transfer over 802.11g is a non-starter.

Apple needs to get its wireless house in order.

And while we're talking, just between the two of use, I should probably point out that 802.11n, while much faster than "g", still isn't the best way to move large amounts of data. While fast, for all practical purposes it's still much, much slower than a direct USB 2.0 connection.

Start a wireless backup of an 80GB Air to a Time Capsule, and be prepared to wait... a... very... long... time.

Ditto for .Mac file syncing. Great for a few Word documents. Terrible for nearly anything else.

An obvious alternative would have been to plug in a FireWire drive, but that's gone too.

And since we've mentioned FireWire, let me just come right out and say that I don't miss it. Nearly any consumer drive with FW also has USB. Sure, it's not as fast as FW/800, but with a 80GB (or 64GB) drive, you're not moving terabytes of data back and forth either.

Camcorders also often use FW to download video, but really, the Air isn't a video editing station. If you need one, buy a 17" MBP. (Besides, who really wants the misery of trying to run Final Cut on a 13" screen?)

Gigabit ethernet the next fastest available solution to moving data around, but unfortunately, Apple's adaptor only supports 10/100.

So what's left?

It's odd, in this day and age, that the best solution harken's back to the days of sneakernet.

I bought a 8GB thumb drive that has nearly all of my projects and documents on it, and that I sync between the Air and my iMac as needed.

I also acquired a 320GB USB-powered drive from Western Digital. It's light and spacious, and I can continue to do backups to it when on the road. It also has room for a larger subset of my iMac's music and movie library, sparing my Air's meager SSD drive for other things

I've also cloned my Air's Leopard installation disk to it, giving me an out if I'd ever need to do a disk repair or Leopard install.

And yes, I recognize the fact that carrying another drive obviates some of the Air's supposed size and weight advantages. But really, all of the reasons I carry it also applied when I carried the 17" MacBook Pro.

Which to my mind, makes it a wash.

Comments

[Keith Deininger]

I truly do not like the Mac Air unit for the sole reasons of not having external ports for USB and Firewire.

If you want to use a USB Flash Drive along with a USB mouse device rather than Bluetooth mouse, add the need to connect the DVD Superdrive and whoops... you need an external USB hub.

The Air is cute, however it is limited as to what you can really use it for. I would much rather use my Macbook that has everything built-in and have nothing extra to carry when I travel. As soon as you start needing to carry 'extra' devices, something is going to get broken or lost while in transit.

Keith