MacBook Air.......ARGH!

Ok... I have no shame. I was sitting outside the Apple Store this morning watching the various blogs running down what was announced at MacWorld. The doors opened at 10, I put away my MacBook Pro and moved to one of the store machines with various windows open keeping the info flowing on all the latest and greatest from the big Steve Jobs Keynote.

All looked good, including the MacBook Air until I took a look at some of the specs... sooooo close... yet it has missed the mark in my opinion. At least for the time being, my credit card sits safely parked in my wallet and I will continue to use my boxy little black MacBook.

There are some really cool things Apple has done with the laptop. The size is great, the multi touch controls are cool, and the fact that they have gone waaay green with the MacBook Air is cool. I don't think that it is a bad laptop for everyone.

If size is your main criteria and you don't use a lot of accessories, this could be the machine for you, but as a working photographer, here's why it isn't the machine for me:

1. No firewire... it is apparently USB bootable, but still... I want firewire. With the difference in speed and the $$ I've invested in all the firewire accesories, I don't plan to toss them for a slower USB2 solution.
   
2. No removable battery. Why, why, why... Obviously the designers have never flown cross-country on an airplane with no outlets for charging a laptop. I don't want to be stuck with the battery in the laptop and no way to replace it. We (my wife and I) had one of the original orange and white iBooks (it was my wife's work laptop) and the only problem it ever had was the bolted-in-battery. The specs say five hours of battery life... not that Apple ever makes overly-optimistic claims about their batteries...
   
3. One USB port. So pick one device and plug it in. Or for more than one device you can use a USB hub... oh, you want to use a bus powered device like a hard drive and an EVDO modem on the hub, no problem, you better find a powered USB hub then. That means you better find a plug to use it, too... not too mobile of a lifestyle if you have to travel plug to plug to use more than one accessory at once.
   
4. No ethernet port. Airport is cool, I like Airport, I use Airport, but I also like ethernet. Sure there is an ethernet dongle, it plugs into... you guessed it! The lone USB port.
5. No internal CD/DVD drive. Years ago I owned a laptop that was really small and cool... except that it had no internal CD/DVD drive. It didn't bother me until I tried to balance the laptop and the external CD/DVD drive on the airplane seat tray... it is actually easier to use a 15" or 17" laptop than to fiddle with a smaller laptop and an external drive.
   
6. No ExpressCard slot. I have gotten to like the ExpressCard slot in the MacBook Pro. It adds a lot more functionality than the old PCMCIA slot, and would have gone a long way towards me being able to live without firewire... sigh.....
7. Dinky hard drives. If you opt for the faster solid state drive and want to use Boot Camp you don't have much room left on your hard drive. That goes for the 80gb drive, too.
   
8. 1.6 or 1.8 Core2Duo? Have I gone back in time, isn't that slower than even the entry-level MacBook... no, it is 2008 and it is slower than the $1000 laptop.
9. It's new... I would wait a few months to see what if any issues come up once these laptops make it into the wild. While Apple makes pretty darn good laptops (generally) the first run of each radical new design tends to have some issues, some persistent, others easily fixable. I would wait to see how many of each this laptop has.
   
   
   I was really hoping this was going to be a real replacement to the 12" Powerbook. I was at the Apple Store and ready to throw down the $$ but unfortunately this just isn't the Mac for me. :-(
   

Mac Backup on the Road

One of the most vulnerable times for a photographer to suffer computer issues or data loss is on the road. This is also where photographers are rarely backed up.

We are creatures of habit. Get on location, setup, shoot, drop images into the laptop, edit, get the selects to the client, break everything down, job well done.

But once in a while the unexpected happens. Just like we plan for hardware failure with backup cameras, and extra flash and more than one memory card and camera battery, your laptop has the ability to fail, too. The most likely part of your laptop to fail unexpectedly is the hard drive. So backing it up is important... and if you are a Mac user, relatively simple.

The first thing to look at is how much junk you have on your laptop. I am a firm believer in keeping a laptop slim with only the things you need to get the job done. I don’t save a lot of photos, games, or a library of every QuickTime movie I’ve ever downloaded on the laptop... I waste the hard drive space on my desktop computer for things like that!

As soon as I get back to my office from a shoot, I move the photos off my laptop and onto my desktop system which then gets it started in my archiving system so I know it is backed up and protected.

By limiting what I keep on the laptop, it also makes it easier to back it up. My backup solution is simple. I have an external portable firewire hard drive... portable drives are the ones that run off the firewire cable and require no A/C Power. The MacBook and MacBook Pro will also boot off of a USB2 drive... but running a machine off of a USB drive is a slow and frustrating experience... stick with firewire.

It is also true that portable hard drives are more expensive and offer less storage than the desktop variety hard drive, but remember, you are buying this to use with a laptop. Portable drives are powered off the firewire connection to the computer and they are much smaller, meaning you don't need to fire somewhere to plug it in and it will fit in your laptop bag. You can be thrifty and buy a full sized hard drive, but you are not going to enjoy dragging it around in your bag and always be searching for a plug when you need to use it.

I normally use SuperDuper to make the backup of the hard drive. SuperDuper creates a perfect bootable clone of my hard drive and also allows you to do synchronized backups after the first full backup. (This means that instead of it backing up the entire drive every time you back up, you have the option to only update the things that have changed since the last backup... saving boatloads of time.)

*Note - SuperDuper is now 10.5 compatible.

If you are using an Intel based Mac, there are ways you can back up your Windows partition, too... but that's a topic for another time.

Regardless of which software you use to create your backup, make sure that you select the option to make a bootable backup. That way, if you need to boot from the external drive, you power down your Mac, plug it in, hold down the “Option” button while booting up, select the external drive, and you are back in business.

The other reason having a bootable backup is to repair your main hard drive if it starts acting weird when you are on the road. You can boot up from the external and run the disk utility or other fixit programs on the main drive and hopefully be able to repair it. If you can't, no big deal, just clone your backup back over to your main drive and you are back with a working OS again.

Assuming that you keep your laptop slimmed down without a bunch of extra unnecessary stuff, you should only need to update the backup every month or so to account for software upgrades.

Another thing that I would suggest is create two partitions on the external drive so you can use the extra partition as an alternate storage location for images. If you use a program like PhotoMechanic, you can set it to import the images to a folder on your main hard drive and to copy them to the second partition on the external drive at the same time. That way you have an immediate backup of the files.

If I am shooting out of town, I usually store my external drive separately from my laptop after I've loaded my shoot in it so that if my laptop bag gets stolen, at least I have all my images backed up safely somewhere else (like in my camera bag.) If you keep the external drive with your laptop and it disappears or gets run over by a bus or something... you are hosed.

So remember to backup your laptop and have fun if you make it to MacWorld... I'm home hanging out with the twins.