Wired: The new MacBook Air, launched by Apple this month, is being heralded as a revolutionary new laptop in the press, writes Danny O'Brien.
It's as slim as an envelope, with five hours of battery time. It's also revolutionary in a different way: costing more than most laptops on the market, it has less CPU power and disk storage space than entry-level machines. Clearly, for now, being small and chic costs.
But not forever: and the shifting forms and function of laptops is determining the new shape of computer use here in Silicon Valley: both in the practice of its gadget-heavy denizens and in the plans being made here for the next generation of software.
Silicon Valley's outlook on portable hardware has been, to put it charitably, somewhat blinkered. The place has been notoriously biased against mobile phones and other small form-factor devices. Even a few years ago, mobile phones were rare but laptops surprisingly prominent on public transport. The first mobiles to really take off among coders and venture capitalists here were Blackberrys - almost parodies of pocket laptops, with their Qwerty keyboards and lack of the usual cellphone bling. A friend calls it a habit of the "ASCII Amish" - traditional computer users who cannot bear to leave their full-sized keyboards for the world of thumbing and texting. Bigger, for the Valley, was always better.
Now, mirroring that momentous Seventies tech collision when office-sized mini-computers were suddenly faced with equally high-powered desktop-sized desktop computers, smart mobile phones here are intermixing with the use patterns of the standard PC. Desktop usage is declining as Wi-Fi and 3G have untethered users from their wired connections. Websites produce mobile-optimised sites, or cater for fully featured browsers on phone screens.
But it's a very confusing interbreeding. Some Silicon Valleys, such as OQO, have struggled to cram a modern PC into what's known as the "ultra-mobile PC" form-factor: a laptop you can hold in your hand. On the other end, phones running the Pocket PC platform have sought to merge mobile phone software with the traditional desktop Windows user interface. Neither has really taken the world by storm. And as Apple introduces a severely weakened and high-price laptop to pander to the "small is wonderful" crowd, so its iPhone makes no pretence of taking the place of its laptop bigger brothers.
But straight in the middle of iPhone and Macbook Air is another market that's emerging, and is currently the underground hit in the Valley: the Asus EEE PC (sold in Europe as the education-oriented Asus MiniBook). The machine is small, underpowered - but cheap. It does without a hard drive (it uses a 4GB solid-state flash drive), thus giving it a longer battery life than a standard laptop. It also does without Windows, lowering its price by using a modified version of Linux, with more than 40 applications included in the price. It sells for about €200 (or $300 in the US).
Geeks like the Mac, but they like a snug, neat deal more. And because it's a standard PC and running Linux, it's eminently hackable. Enthusiasts have Frankensteined a touch-screen to it, added Bluetooth and more RAM, even got Windows and Mac OS X to run on it. They keep their EEE PC in their backpacks and their handbags, and are fooling around with them in brand new ways.
Edging up from the phone end of the spectrum is the Nokia N810 - a tiny pocketable Linux tablet with GPS and a stubby Qwerty keyboard. (A disclosure here: Nokia included me in its Developers' program, where I get an N810 for €99 instead of the real price of €400. I haven't yet received one, but it is worth noting that Nokia is selling these products specifically to those who they think will write interesting code for them.)
Both of these feel like unfinished but malleable products that are open enough to allow anyone to play with them. What's the result? Software that is even more determined to find a local Wi-Fi spot, and find ways to use it. Websites and services that give you full maps, and local reviews and news from any zipcode.
It's not the glitter of the new Apple laptops, nor is it the locked-down minimalism of the traditional phone. Its popularity here will not, perhaps, map to the popularity - or the media visibility - of either of those offerings. But it does provide a blank and easily malleable slate for prototyping new ideas quickly while they experiment on themselves.
Most of what you see on these machines are grubby little programs for cheap little machines that try out new ideas. Mostly they fail, but a few don't.
Those few will point to the future potential of this form-factor. Is it a grown-up mobile phone or a pocket PC? Neither; and yet it seems to sit alongside both, and may be the point of merger for them all.
It's not ready for primetime yet. As befits the boutique laptops of Apple and the top-end smartphones, you can't be too thin, or cost too much. But when the second of those restraints vanishes - then we'll see a real revolution.
