Macbook Air My Ideal PC

MacBook Air

My Ideal PC System: MacBook Air

There are tens of thousands of different PCs and laptops on the market today, each attempting to make a unique statement of their unique value. In defining my dream system I prioritized a series of favorite features I have in selecting a system, with the most critical being an operating system stable enough to manage complex video and sound editing tasks yet affordable enough from a hardware design standpoint to be within my budget. Research included the use of websites specializing in laptop comparisons in addition to visiting the websites of Acer, Apple, Dell, Gateway, HP, Lenovo and retailers' websites including BestBuy.com, Costco.com, WalMart.com and others. As a system that has exceptional video and sound editing capability requires knowledgeable service and support I also visited the actual sales outlets of these manufacturers as well. The differences in expertise and knowledge on the part of retail and product support staff are critical for my dream system as the software and hardware will have to be tightly integrated with each other.

Description of Dream System

My ideal or dream system would have an Intel processor yet a more advanced and reliable operating system than Microsoft Windows Vista, which has been plagued with problems specifically in the area of plug-and-play compatibility with media devices and the lack of protected memory for video editing. Due to these limitations and the lack of Application Programmer Interface (API) consistency across many of the Intel-based laptops running just Microsoft Windows Vista, the Apple MacBook Air was included in this analysis. There are two configurations of the MacBook Air produced today, the first with a 1.6MHz Intel Core 2 duo processor, and the second with a 1.86MHz Intel Core 2 duo processor. Both systems are configured with the Apple Macintosh OS X version 10.5 Leopard operating system that includes digital and audio editing utilities in addition to XCode Developer Tools, a language specifically used for creating Mac OS X extension-based applications and add-on applications. The Macintosh OS X operating system also specifically is designed to streamline the calculation requirements between graphics, video and auditing applications and the main microprocessor as well (Cohen, Dalrymple, Michaels, 2008).

The ideal system for what I am trying to accomplish with video and audio editing also will have nearly instantaneous disk access of over 100GB. The bus architecture of the PC or laptop will also be streamlined to allow for concurrent or multi-threading of video, audio and real-time streaming directly from the Internet. Creating an online video channel just from this laptop to highlight areas of interest is a high expectation, yet my dream system needs to be able to support concurrent heavy-bandwidth tasks without running out of memory or crashing due to lack of resources. My deal system will also need to be able to publish video with soundtracks over the Internet to websites for their use and also to create animations on the fly without being physically connected to optical disks, large storage rack server farms of disk arrays, or be constrained in any way from gaining access to video content online. Lastly my ideal system will have several different Internet connectivity options available, each with speeds that will make video uploading and downloading possible in real-time.

Research Results

After researching the area of laptops and PCs capable of delivering the specifications of my dream system, and this included reading the analysis from industry-leading journalists and writers (Cheung, 2008), it became evident that Microsoft Windows Vista-based systems based on Intel processors would be a gamble based on the performance of these systems during audio and video recording. In addition to the sporadic quality levels of these laptops, doing through the build-to-order configuration process at each of the manufacturers' Acer, Apple, Dell, Gateway, HP, Lenovo and retailers' websites brought out the fact that upgrades to graphics and sound editing cards would also be critical for my ideal system configuration to work. In addition to all these factors, there were updat4es, patches and in the case of those systems sold with Microsoft XP Professional Home Edition, Service Pack Updates that would need to be carefully installed and tested with the audio and video editing applications of interest. When the Apple MacBook Air was included in the analysis it was evident that these capabilities of audio and video editing and multi-streaming were in the baseline utilities that are part of the Macintosh OS X operating system (Cohen, Dalrymple, Michaels, 2008). In addition the costs of increasing SCSI and ATA-based disk access speeds also put many of the Microsoft Windows or Vista-based systems out of my price range. There was also the option of selecting an open source operation system, Linux, with the Dell systems, yet this saved just $300 off the price yet did not significantly increase system performance overall. As the research was completed it was clear that getting the disk performance critical for the applications of interest would cost significantly more that my budget allowed. The tight integration of editing software to the operating system, speed of the 128GB solid-state drive on the MacBook Pro-as tested by MacWorld (Cohen, Dalrymple, Michaels, 2008) and the designed in Internet connectivity all made the system more suited for my specific needs.

Most Important Feature