MBAJ - Explained Again

Listen. Trust me on this, okay. The MacBook Air Jordan is going to be teh popular. You'll be seeing them in all the popular coach and business class seats by the end of summer. Why?

They're thin and light and they look bitchin'. They're Macs. Macs are the new cool computer.

They'll do what most people need a computer to do. An MBAJ will check email, play iTunes movies on a biggish (for business class) screen, and shop Amazon. Most folks don't pay much attention to things like megahertz and rpms and benchmarks and refresh rates. They just don't care.

Once upon a time, a lot of restaurants served steaks on stainless steel inserts on bakelite shells. They would put the steel insert on the grill. When they served the steak on that plate, it would still be sizzling. Hence the old business axiom, "Sell the sizzle, not the steak."

The MBAJ is another case of perfect timing on the part of His Steveness. Macs are cool. The Apple logo is tres chic. The MBAJ has the combination of being thin, light, new and groovy, and adorned with an Apple logo. The fact that it is slightly more expensive than other laptops is actually a selling point. There is a cachet to carrying around something that costs a little more than the garden variety corporate utility.

It bestows a bit of prestige to be carrying the very latest and coolest technology. If it was cheap, nobody would want it.

Now, us blogospheroids who get hung up on all the technical numbers and features and architecture and throughput and all that jazz aren't the target market. Who is? Oh, lots of folks.

• Salesmen.
• Business consultants.
• People who travel for a living for non-technical careers.
• Actors and musicians.
• People who travel a lot for pleasure.
• Doctors and lawyers.
• People who don't need massive processing power or piles of storage.
• Insurance adjusters.
• Human Resource managers.
• Small business owners.
• College students.
• People who could get by quite nicely with a PowerBook G4 but can afford $1800.

That's not a complete list – just stream of consciousness rambling – but it's a start. It isn't about the spec sheet. The cachet of carrying a MacBook Air Jordan is the sizzle. People coming over from the land of XP and Vista are going to dig the computing experience. Whatever else the MBAJ is, it's going to be a hell of a lot better than a comparably equipped generic machine running a turn-of-the-century OS.

The sizzle will sell the steak long enough for the word to get around about the quality of the meal.

There. Do you think I've kicked the shit out of an analogy enough for one night?

Good. I have to teach tomorrow.

Has anyone seen the cat lately?