For the majority of those who purchase anything from Apple, justification isn’t on the horizon. They have their reasons, and for the vast majority of my life, I’ve disagreed with them. Completely and uncompromisingly. They say it’s easy to learn – I’ve shown them ease in Windows and Android. They said it’s portable – I’ve shown them Chromebooks and razor-thin mobiles. They said it is stylish – I’ve shown them my middle finger.
But then I got a MacBook myself.
A Macbook Air to be exact. A 1.6Ghz Core i5 with 8GB of RAM and HD display to be even more precise. And was forced to ask myself – why did I ? It cost me a goodly 66.5 grand, no financing and no EMI. In other words, it cost me about a month and a half’s salary, or as much as I’d normally save in three months. Everyone from my friends to my parents suddenly thought I’d given into peer pressure and finally wanted something stylish.
They weren’t wrong. Ever since my Asus Eeebook had given up its keyboard to the nether lords, I’d decided that I’d go for the Big Apple, literally. This was buttressed by the fact that ever since I got a substantial job, I’ve been seeing people sporting Apple products without elan. I say without because they don’t show off, but rather use them like trusty workhorses. So there was the obvious question – why not I ?
If this was anyone else, he or she would end this article right here. Utility and dependability are more than enough for a lot of people, and throw in good looks and you have a killer package. But the fact of the matter is that I am who I am. I’ve been one who has been deriding Apple ever since I had the sense to compare one gadget with another. I’ve also been the one who has made “latest and greatest” a motto of his life. So why Apple ?
To begin with, I wanted to break out. I wanted to break out of the HDD and graphics card hothouse that I’d been sitting in ever since my dad bought a Lenovo laptop way back in 2009. Most people understand this to be the definition of a laptop. They whirr and whine into action, become hot, but allow people to work and relax on the fly. But all that enjoyment ends when that hotness translates into sickness, which in turn ends up burning a hole in your pocket.
So I wanted to go in for something that would not burn my balls (argghh literally again!) but would get the job done. So I started looking for laptops that had SSD (solid state drive) storage and lacked the fans and DVD drives. By this time I had a desktop that had all of these, and did all my heavy lifting. So not only could I ditch fans and optical drives, I could also ditch discrete graphics cards (which are crap compared to desktop ones anyway) and also the need to get a really beefy processor.
In other words, I could just get myself a netbook along the lines of my old Asus. The problem was that said Asus had begun its slow decline barely two months into operation. I didn’t want to purchase myself another affordable inconvenience.
The alternative was something called an Ultraportable. These had SSDs and lacked everything I could jettison. Funnily though, I could hardly find a good ultraportable below 55K. And the ones I did find were all from companies I dared not trust anymore aka Lenovo and Asus. HP, for instance, offered its Spectre for a 1L+ price. Dell’s XPS range competed with the higher end Macbooks. Over countless hours of research, the Macbook Air stopped appearing as insanely costly as all the other Apple products.
Next came the question of weight. I didn’t want a behemoth. In a way, this was quite the opposite of what I had in mind when I got my first personal laptop in 2014. That beast adorned my desk, effectively earning for itself the dusty moniker of desktop par excellence. Also, after a few months, the battery life began to go downhill. So this time around, I wanted something that would be light but would have admirable battery life.
Voila, the Macbook Air was up to the mark once again.
My last criterion was, as my motto suggests, something of the present generation. Here I slipped up. I believed that the MMGF2HN/A was the latest, though only a moderate improvement over the older one. I bought the Macbook Air under this impression, and I was wrong. As it turns out, Apple had made another incremental upgrade to the series by doubling the SSD storage. Along with it, it had also increased the price by 20K. Rather, it had kept the prices such that the 2015 model came to 65K and the 2016 one came to 85K. Stupid, but that goes for a lot of the pricing decisions taken in Cupertino.
So in a way I neither had the latest nor the greatest. At the same price point, I could get a core i7 with a less than decent graphics card and equally less than decent battery life. I could also sacrifice some of these, jack up the price somewhat more and end up with an ultrabook. But at the Macbook AIr’s price point-feature set equilibrium, I could only find the Macbook Air.
Just to be sure, I decided to head to the forums where the vital decisions regarding my desktop had been made the year before. I came up with nothing. The die was finally cast.
So now that I have obtained my Macbook Air, what do I think of it ? I could say a lot, but let me wait a couple of days, see how this pretty creature performs. Maybe, once the looks and the swank of the Mac OS becomes stale, I would be able to tell myself that the money I paid was after all worth it.
Stay tuned for a full review!