Posted on 06/16/2012 4:35:28 AM PDT by Halfmanhalfamazing
In a lengthy email interview with TechCrunch's Scott Merrill, Linux creator Linus Torvalds allows that he's a bit baffled at how nobody else seems to have done what Apple did with the MacBook Air - even several years after the Air's first release.
Torvalds pronounces the Air "special" and "ahead of its time", elaborating that he wants his office to be quiet, with the loudest thing in the room the occasional purring of the cat, and that when he travels, he wants to travel light, contending that a notebook weighing more than a kilo (2.2 lb.) is less than ideal, but at least his 11.6" MacBook Air comes very close to the magical 1 kg limit.
Torvalds attributes Apple's hardware success to focus, noting that Apple has rather few SKUs compared to most big computer manufacturers, and this allows the limited variety of machines Apple does build to be better than average - a kind of focus that takes guts. He says he's not an Apple fan, because he thinks they've done some really bad things, but that he has to give them credit for not just having good designers, but the guts to go with it, adding that Steve Jobs clearly had a lot to do with that.
The Linuxmeister expects the MacBook Air form factor will be taken for granted in a few years. His love for thin-and-light notebooks long predates the MacBook Air, and it's not like Apple made up the concept, Apple just executed it well. We could say the same of the iPod, the smartphone, and the iPad.
pings
Expensive, and underpowered. It’s like asking why doesn’t everyone drive a Vespa.
Has he never seen an Android tablet?
PC users can have their pick from a wide range of models in the Ultrabook category including the UX21 from Asus and they are very competitive with the Air.
There is NO QUESTION that Apple hardware is absolutely first class. If you’ve repaired laptops (I have, and both of us lived to tell the tale - those screws and connectors are mighty small and delicate), there is simply no comparison between the quality of an HP and Apple laptop.
My only problem with Apple hardware is that it is WAY overpriced, and some of the smaller Apple products are not really built to be easily repaired.
If money wasn’t an issue, Windows users would buy Apple laptops and reformat the disks.
My, my. Linus Torvalds is now a Mac fanboi, according to you, lol?
Apple designs and builds very well executed, beautiful hardware, and have made very few missteps along the way.
Same with the OS that comes with the hardware, imho, but you can certainly install Linux on a Mac and enjoy just the superior hardware if you want.
> and reformat the disks.
Thereby immediately voiding their warranty and perhaps some other arcane Apple usage restrictions.
Linus has money, and he probably has a server-class machine at home that his MacBook can connect to. He probably treats his MacBook as a large-screen Kindle.
Thereby immediately voiding their warranty and perhaps some other arcane Apple usage restrictions.I think you're confusing Apple with Newegg, with a Lenovo laptop running Windows. LINK
I use a MacBook Air as my primary machine. It's more than fast enough for everything I do (mainly software development), it's very portable, very solid (no worries about it warping if I pick it up by one edge), and it allows me to "legally" run every operating system I might need to use.
Sure, it's more expensive (but not so much when compared to other laptops with the same features/specs), but so are Snap-On tools compared to Chinese junk they sell at Harbor Freight.
Linus is right. I have one, and there is nothing else on the market to compare.
Until you’ve owned a Mac laptop, you don’t really appreciate the quality difference in the hardware. It’s night and day.
I have the 11 inch Air. Enjoy it thoroughly. No complaints. Except of course, $$.
I have an Acer netbook dual-booting Windows 7 Pro and Linux Mint 12 that pretty much has all the advantages that Linus is talking about. I bought a nine-cell battery for it that gives me over 8 hours of uptime.
Me, too. The 11-inch is a great tool for me, as I haul it around all day at client sites.
Update: Newegg tells us that, oops, this was all a terrible mistake.
http://consumerist.com/2012/06/newegg-no-well-totally-take-returns-after-you-install-linux.html
Apple will not take returns unless the system is returned in its original condition with its original OS.
If your Apple is fast enough, you can run Linux as a VM guest in Apple’s Boot Camp.
Fair enough.
Just to be clear: Boot Camp is not used for virtualization. It is used for dual-booting. So, you can make part or all of your hard drive a Windows partition and boot in to Windows natively.
There are also several virtualization systems for the Mac. I happen to use VMware (mainly because I’ve been using it almost 10 years and am comfortable with it) to run Windows 7 and Linux VMs. It works great,
PC users can have their pick from a wide range of models in the Ultrabook categoryOf course, there wouldn't be a "ultrabook" category of Windows-based PCs if there hadn't been the MacBook Air 4 years ago. It's nice to see the Windows world finally catching up.
> Boot Camp is not used for virtualization. It is used for
> dual-booting.
Ah. I was ignorant of this fact. Thanks for the clarification.
> I happen to use VMware
I use KVM on my Linux native boxes, but I use VirtualBox on my laptop. VBox has a “seamless mode” where the guest and host desktops are integrated. Very, very nice.
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