An article on TUAW about the history of the MacBook Air prompted me to think back in early 2010, when I was comparison shopping for a lightweight laptop. My search had come down to four choices:

• the Toshiba Portégé M800,
• the Panasonic Y5,
• the Lenovo ThinkPad X301, and
• the MacBook Air.

At the time, these light-weight machines were premium-priced products that were selling between $2000 and $3000. So only after painfully extended deliberation did I order the Lenovo X301 because of its inclusion of the DVD drive. However, Lenovo cancelled my order in the spring of 2010. And that has made all the difference.

I have always despised that convention unique to PCs of appending a bunch of numbers to the name. Fittingly enough, I would have been fine just choosing the MacBook Air on that criteria alone. But practically, I wanted a very light machine with as minimal a power brick as possible. And I could not make that personal compromise about my DVD drive very easily. The funny thing is that I ended up buying a SuperDrive, trying not to make that compromise at all. I used it once since I purchased it. Smart compromise, Apple.

To round out the experience, the support for my MacBook Air has been fantastic, with only one battery issue between the two machines I owned (side note: I was a bit impetuous when the late 2010 MacBook Air refresh came out with the 4GB of RAM that I really wanted in order to run VMWare smoothly).

I have been asked about my favorite product before, and it is hands down my MacBook Air. I choose to remember that the past was filled with backache and heavy messenger bags loaded up with power adapters and extra batteries. I know that a better way exists, and that the right compromises were hard to accept but necessary for each of our sakes. Looking forward to 2012, I want to make products that solve people’s problems and to make the right compromises in the process. It will be a tough road, but definitely worth traveling.

Addendum: http://www.tuaw.com/2012/01/15/the-macbook-air-four-years-later/

Here’s why I’d predict this sort of product from Apple: the current field is ripe for two things, simplification and opportunity. PayPal touts that their NFC solution only needs a few taps of the phone; Apple will figure out a shorter series of steps. The world’s largest App Store still needs a credit card; Apple will make purchasing digital goods even more seamless and accessible than before. And with its current hardware profile that includes a camera, I’m sure an app will appear faster than George Costanza can say “Important things go in a case”, which would likely scan old-fashioned paper receipts on the spot for tagging and uploading into iCloud. Apple will ask you to say goodbye to back pain, cash, credit cards, and receipts. And consumers will love it.

“We don’t want to lose our direct relationship with our subscribers. It’s at the core of our business model,” Rob Grimshaw told Reuters in an interview on Monday.

To give you, fair reader, some context: Apple’s 30% cut of subscription revenues is a decoy statement, not the real deal like John Gruber states. In fact, it masks the real reason why Apple’s instituting this policy (from this article):

“Customer data for in-app subscribers will remain with Apple, generally speaking, but customers will have the option to send their name, email address, and zip code to publishers. (Opt-in, not opt-out.)”

And the reason why this is important: it’s estimated that 35% of a high-quality content publisher’s revenues come from subscriptions, whereas 65% of revenues come from advertisers.^1,2 If advertisers can’t rely on publishers for reliable demographic/ethnographic data, they won’t justify paying premiums to the publishers. Publishers in turn will get their 65% of revenues knocked down. And who wins? Definitely not the publishers.

Bottom line: Know your business model, quality publishers, because even the pundits get it wrong! Apple is threatening the very survival of curated content on their platform with this approach.

The “what” is particularly tricky, since the “who” is actually composed of a larger public mindset whose perceptions of acceptable behavior, taste, and content continuously change. What is innovative can become intolerable very quickly. Consider the following example, bottled water. Earlier in the millennium (by the way, has society agreed on a name for this decade yet?), bottled water was very popular. Now, it’s shunned as wasteful and damaging to the environment.

Recommendation: The best way to meet this challenge is to adopt an all (versus the alternative “nothing”) approach. Making an implicit contract regarding censorship and moderation with the wider public is a futile effort if the objective is to broaden appeal to the widest possible market. Thus, letting everything in based on a very small and specific functional criteria set is probably the best and easiest method for Apple’s goals. Otherwise, you’ll have to adopt a continuously evolving (and large) censorship filter that adapts to users on the fly, based on sentiment analysis and international thinking (one common fallacy is that the US should be the arbiter of taste, but what about every other country that has access to the App Store?), which is the alternative. Apple is definitely in between a rock and a hard place.

Scaling the controls to the content is extraordinarily important and the problem here is that for 10 functions, one product uses 5 buttons and the other uses 3. For example, if the door knob of a door is too small, many people can’t grasp it and apply the right amount of torque to open the door. In this case, Apple might have found the ideal physical control system while minimizing physical controls with the 2G. However, they might have mistaken necessity for an opportunity to be too clever since having fewer controls seems to have made some functions more difficult to access. In other words, the density of functionality with one control method should be kept to a minimum.

Recommendation: Merge the audio feedback system in the 3G with the physical controls of the 2G. It keeps the control systems consistent and simple to understand.