Meego 1.2, Meego Laptop and a MacBook Air

1 minute, 40 seconds

As many of you know, I’ve had an on again, off again, and then on again affair with Meego. I love that lil’ guy! You may have expected me to be quite excited about the recent release of Meego 1.2, including a netbook refresh. Since I was running Meego on a netbook, you may have then also expected me to be super excited about the very recent announcement of the ASUS Eee PC X101. This is a 2lb laptop that runs Meego and is expected to cost $200. Sweet!

However, as you may have guessed from the title of this post, I’m not running Meego any more. I’m running OS X on a MacBook Air 11″. I had crossed the threshold of tinkering around on a laptop, to wanting to commute with one every day. Indeed, 2lb was my sweet spot for a laptop. I wasn’t that stuck on the OS as my apps are all cross platform enough. I seriously considered many different netbooks and then the MacBook Air came out. The 11″ was just over 2lb, included a full size keyboard, had a 1366 x 768 screen and a 5 hour battery. It was also insanely small. For a relative paltry $1000, there was simply no laptop, regardless of OS, that had had all of the above features. Period. Though I think the new Eee X101 will be very cool, it lacks the screen resolution of the Air. I briefly considered the Sony Vaio X (no longer available) which met all my requirements, but it was a pretty penny to pay for an Atom processor.

“But if you want something super light, what about a iPad?”, you ask? I do agree, an iPad’s insanely long battery life coupled with 1.3lb weight has some handy uses: a cross country plane ride, long regular commutes where you want to read the news and browse email or need a super light weight video conference rig. But what about when you want to run an IDE? What if you want to compose a 3 page (7,500 character) long email? What if you want to flip back forth between the 3 browsers you have open to check how your code renders? The answer is clear: you need a laptop.

I’ve been super happy with my Air and I wish the best of luck to Meego.

One thought on “Meego 1.2, Meego Laptop and a MacBook Air

  1. Meego laptop owner

    You are right about iPad. It is a great tablet but it is chiefly a media consumption device and not something to produce content on.

    Meego revolves around social networking for the most part, but you can run Office apps like openoffice on it. You can basically install any RPM package on it, which makes it pretty powerful.

    BTW, I had a chance to play Vaio X and boy it was a cool laptop. Too bad, they equipped it with an Atom.

    Reply

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