Bijan Sabet

My Apple netbook

As I look back on 2009, my calendar (and my body) serve as a reminder that I traveled a ton. And I don’t see that changing in 2010.

So I bought a new MacBook Air this weekend. It has a 128gig solid state drive. It’s super light, quiet and smooth. I’m going to use this strictly as my travel computer not as my main computer at the office. (I wouldn’t recommend using this as your primary computer).

In a way it’s my netbook. This is how wikipedia describes a netbook:

Netbooks (sometimes also called mini notebooks or ultraportable) are a branch of subnotebooks, a rapidly evolving category of small, light and inexpensive laptop computers suited for general computing and accessing web-based applications; they are often marketed as “companion devices,” that is, to augment a user’s other computer access

The MacBook Air fits that description except for the inexpensive part. But Moore’s law will win that fight.

Since the local storage is relatively small, I decided to use this machine very differently than my other computers.

-the vast majority of my data stored in the cloud (email, documents, photos, music, etc)

-primarily using only two desktop apps: Chrome and Dropbox

-gmail for personal email and msft outlook web access to for my work stuff

-the web gives me my music fix so I don’t need local storage or apps for that

-photos all goto flickr for archive & backup. my favorite pix goto tumblr

-if i need to do anything creative with my digital work, I’ll take it to Aviary

-any thing that i happen to download goes to dropbox which automagically ends up on my heavy duty Macs. those items get backed up and/or syncd to the iphone.

-I’m not going to install MSFT Office on this computer. I think I’ll be more than fine with Google Docs and Apple iWork as a backup. This will be my first business machine without Office.

Let’s see how this experiment goes. I’m optimistic.