Apple's MacBook Air: A 'Windy' Hackintosh Alternative

Now that I’m running Windows in a virtualized fashion, I’m slowly but surely migrating over from Windows versions of programs to OS X-native alternatives. I still use Outlook 2000 as my email client and PIM, and I still write my articles in Word 2000 for Windows, since the EDN-supplied templates aren’t compatible with Office for Mac. But all of my web surfing, for example, takes place in Firefox for OS X. 

So it was that, while I was in San Francisco for AES last week, I felt myself pulled towards the Apple Store at 4th and Market that I passed by several times a day as I traversed between my overnight accommodations and Moscone Center. Three times I succumbed to temptation, and each time I was drawn to the assortment of MacBook Air computers in a back corner of the establishment. This was my first chance to spend some quality time with the unit, since I didn’t attend the Macworld Expo where Steve Jobs unveiled the system. And, paraphrasing Jimmy Carter’s famous Playboy Magazine interview quote, I looked on it with lust, and even though my MacBook was in the bag hanging from my shoulder at the time, I committed adultery in my heart.

The MacBook Air is, after all, one svelte and sexy piece of hardware:

But it also costs $1799 (1.6 GHz, 80GB HDD) or $2598 (1.8 GHz, 64GB SSD) new, with refurbished counterparts respectively selling for $1499 and $2299. That’s a whole lot of money to pay for a laptop that’s only moderately thinner and lighter than the one I have now…no matter that with Microsoft’s Windows Hardware Engineering Conference coming up next month and the Consumer Electronics Show looming on the early-January horizon (I got my first CES meeting request yesterday, believe it or not), ‘moderately thinner and lighter’ sounds pretty good. Instead, I decided to satiate my appetite for one of the Intel Atom-based ‘netbooks’ that I recently wrote about. Specifically, I selected MSI’s Wind U100:

At first glance, the Wind might not even seem to be in the same ballpark as the MacBook Air:

• It embeds a 1.6 GHz cache-deficient single-core (albeit with HyperThreading support) CPU with no out-of-order execution capability, multimedia instruction set support or other ‘modern’ microprocessor features
• It’s 1/2" thicker (albeit 0.7 lbs lighter)
• It has a smaller, lower-resolution LCD (albeit with a MacBook Air-reminiscent LED backlight) and a more diminutive keyboard
• Its chassis is made of (sturdy) plastic, not aluminum
• It doesn’t provide a DVI output, only VGA
• Its Wi-Fi subsystem doesn’t support 802.11n, and
• It doesn’t run OS X (at least out of box…keep reading…)

Consider the following counterpoints, however:

• It has a removable, therefore user-replaceable, battery
• It provides three conventional USB v2 ports, versus the MacBook Air’s single, largely form factor-incompatible USB portal
• Its hard drive is of the conventional, high-capacity 2.5" variety (versus the less common, smaller 1.8" HDD used by Apple in the MacBook Air and iPod classic), and is easily replaceable and upgradeable
• Its DRAM is mounted on SoDIMMs, not soldered down to the system board
• It integrates a multi-format memory card reader slot, along with a GbE transceiver
• It does run Windows XP Home, and
• It costs less than 1/4th what you’d pay for a HDD-based MacBook Air

Continue reading with Part 2, ‘MSI’s Wind U100: Hands-On Impressions And Hacking Plans‘…