the Onda

When I bought my Macbook Air, I debated for about 20 seconds whether to spend the extra grand on the solid state drive. On the one hand it was the bleeding edge, and I've now come to realize that laptops last long enough and evolve fast enough to be worth spending the extra cash up front. What decided me against it was not saving $1,300 (though this helped), but what I call the VW Bug theory of technology purchasing.

When you are buying technology in an industry which is driven by mass market economics (which center around price/performance), it never pays to buy something off of a new branch on the evolutionary tree— at least not in the first generations. This was the genius of the original 1960s VW bug; because it used tried and true car technologies, its economics were riding the tail end of the experience curve. Ditto for spinning hard drives— because a few manufacturers have made billions of them, they've been able to learn how to optimize all of the critical metrics: density of storage, speed of access, and power.

I was worried that the flash speed of access improvement wasn't going to be significant enough, but as it turns out according to Tom's Hardware this week (one of my favorite hardware review sites), SSD drives suck a lot more power out of your battery than you might have thought. In fact, a lot more than those moving platters.

This is not to say that eventually all notebook hard drives will not turn to flash— I think they absolutely will. It's just that the first few generations of this technology will take a few black eyes. Maybe that's why Apple is now dropping the price of the Macbook Air.