(Updated 1/25) The more I think about the new uber-thin Macbook Air, the more confused I am about one design decision in particular. I can get over the lack of ports, the add-on optical drive, the wimpy graphics. But I keep coming back to the dreadfully small hard drive which maxes out at 80 gigabytes. Yipes! My Macbook Pro’s home directory is over 72 GB alone and I don’t even keep digital photos on it. So why can’t you get a decent size hard drive? Because of Jobs’ obsession with thinness. Slightly thicker hard drives — three millimeters thicker, in fact — go all the way up to 160 GB. It sure feels like Jobs has written off a large portion of the potential Macbook Air market in return for a measly three millimeters of thinness.
Here’s the back story. As Macworld and others have explained, the new Macbook Air is so thin that only a 1.8″ hard drive containing a single spinning platter can fit. Most drives these days have multiple platters. 80 GB is the highest capacity available for single platter 1.8″ drives. It’s the same hard drive in the current 80 GB iPod Classic. Careful observers will note that the iPod Classic 160 GB model is thicker than his little brother, three millimeters thicker. And in fact, the difference between Toshiba’s single-platter 80 GB drive and its dual-platter 160 GB drive is exactly three millimeters.
Hoping you can wait a few months for Toshiba or someone to intro a higher-capacity single-platter drive? It’s gonna be a real long wait. In September, Toshiba announced a prototype 120 GB 1.8″ single platter drive using something called “Discrete Track Recording” but it’s not going to be available until 2009. And, seriously, a year from now minimum acceptable storage requirements are going to be even bigger. How about the super-expensive solid state flash drives? Currently available as a $999 option and maxing out at 64 GB, there’s not much better news here either. Samsung said a few days ago it had doubled the capacity of that drive. The new version, to be available by July, didn’t come with an estimated price tag but it’s sure to be off the charts.
Had Jobs simply allowed the Macbook Air another few millimeters, there would be adequate space for an adequate drive and an adequate price. Unfortunately, thin is a little too in.
UPDATE: The inestimable Jason Snell writes a great post, which as an aside demonstrates so many of blogging’s best attributes, explaining how almost impossible it is for him to fit the contents of his digital life onto the Macbook Air’s slender drive.
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