Here’s a quick comparison of my beloved Acer 1810TZ-4174 and the new Apple Macbook Air 11″:
| Acer 1810TZ | Macbook Air 11″ (new) | |
| Dimensions | ||
| length (in) | 8 | 7.56 |
| width (in) | 11.2 | 11.8 |
| depth (in) | 1.2 | 0.68 |
| weight (lbs) | 3.1 | 2.3 |
| screen (in) | 11.6 | 11.6 |
| USB ports | 3 | 2 |
| SD card slot | Yes! | No* |
| Flash memory | 256MB** | 64MB or 128MB |
| price | $550 + $580 = $1130*** | $999 or $1199 |
* This is probably a deal breaker for me. I take a lot of photographs and being able to download them and quickly upload them online, all without any extra hardware is an important use case for me.
** I bought and replaced the 340GB drive that came with my Acer 1810TZ-4174 with a 256GB solid-state drive (SSD). My netbook isn’t instant on, but everything is definitely faster with the SSD.
*** cost of the base laptop + cost of the Crucial RealSSD C300 that I bought to replace the built-in hard drive.
Rakesh,
I’m still very pleased with my HP Corp Class netbook (Mini 5102) I actually prefer the 10″ form factor for use on airplanes, but being in the graphics business it can’t replace my full sized laptop.
Your requirement for an SD slot could be mitigated with an EyeFi card. Stella and I both use these in our Canon DSLRs. They automatically upload the pics via your household/office wifi. It requires a small app be running on one of your PCs in some cases.
We have the basic 2 GB EyeFi cards. There are more capable EyeFi cards that include wifi access via common carriers like AT&T, MacDonalds, etc. These will upload you pics even when you’re not near home.
When I’m at home taking table top shots for my blogs(s) it’s really cool to shoot an image and find that by the time I make it back to my desk the photo is already waiting for me in the My Pictures folder.
BTW, I upgraded an older laptop with a Seagate Momentus XT hybrid HD. For $100 it’s 500 GB 7200 rpm with 4 GB of flash cache. The laptop boots faster and many commonly used files stay in the cache full-time. It’s made the old beast a lot more enjoyable for another 6-12 months.
I manage a couple of Eye-Fi chips for my Dad (which means when they break, I have to make them work again… joy!) so I’ve had a lot of experience with them. If the Eye-Fi was a little bit slicker, a little bit more of “it just works”, I’d be more excited about them. But there’s too much that annoys me about them. The software doesn’t run as a service in Windows so you have to be logged into a particular account for it to work. The loading of that software on login of that particular user can be blocked if there’s a software update. And generally speaking, I’ve found the software’s notifications to be confusing. Until the recent version, it wouldn’t delete the photos from the chip after copying them to your computer. You almost have to do as much keeping up with the Eye-Fi software and its state as you do manually downloading the photographs… so I have thus far opted for the latter. 🙂