If you can forgive me for the horrific title attached to this article, you may be interested in what the MacBook Air signals for the future of cloud computing. It’s no secret that Apple is getting into cloud computing in a big way this year and plans to debut their iCloud service within the next month or two, but the MacBook Air may be the ideal cloud computer. After ditching the long-lived white MacBook and making the Air their flagship entry-level computer, the message is pretty clear that Apple wants to take users out of the hard drive and into the cloud. Here’s a snippet from Mercury News about it:
In making the move, Apple signaled its view that the future of laptops will be lightweight machines that increasingly rely on cloud services provided through remote servers. It comes as the company gears up to push its iCloud service and vision of a highly synchronized world in which music and other material can be accessed across a number of highly mobile devices.
Essentially, Apple is reframing computing — especially laptops — as mobile and always tethered to the network. Want to go to a meeting this afternoon? Take the extremely lightweight MacBook Air instead of the bulky, thick Dell/Compaq/Whatever. Want all your stuff? Don’t buy a bigger hard drive or an external. Connect instead to iCloud and it’s always at your fingertips.
It’s an excellent example of the Jon Ives design philosophy (that has, no doubt, been informed by Jobs and other higher-ups at Apple who are always thinking “roadmap”). Perhaps this is part of what people are talking about when they are referring to the “post PC” era?
Source: Mercury News
