Why doesn’t the MacBook Air have wireless USB?
Why didn’t the first company to ditch the floppy drive decide to ditch USB cables?
Dell’s XPS M1530, Inspiron 1525, 17-inch Inspiron 1720 and 13-inch M1330 all have wireless USB options, so why doesn’t the MacBook Air? It certainly would have played into the Air’s naming and marketing schemes. Sure, the wireless Dells are ugly, 
but given the lack of expansion ports on the Air, swapping out the USB port for a FireWire one and including wireless USB would have pretty much shut up half the nay sayers out there, ourselves included.
And don’t give us any crap about battery life, Apple could have made an option to turn it off when not in use. And don’t give us any crap about price, as no one concerned with bang for the buck bought an Air. And don’t give us crap about bulk, as, um, well I guess we don’t know exactly how bulky the transmitter would be, but the Dell’s ain’t exactly Twiggy. Still, it would have been nice to see the Air’s technological engineering reflect some more cutting edge technologies to compliment its overall aesthetic design philosophy.
Here’s hoping the new MacBook Pros have something other than that crazy trackpad to write about tomorrow next week.
😉
Because wireless USB isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. USB itself is somewhat flakey so making something that is flakey be transported over something that is flakey is NOT going to make them shut up it’s going to make the de-criers pipe up even more.
Where are you going to buy wireless USB receivers for all of those USB devices?
Well, I admit wireless USB isn’t exactly everywhere yet. However, the Dells ship with a wireless hub to connect stuff to. I’m sure Apple would charge extra for theirs, but it would still be a more innovative move than what they did.
-The Doc
What I think they should have included instead of wireless usb is a firewire 400 port, a firewire 800 port, 3 usb 2 ports, an expansion port, and a 15 inch screen. in other words, not wasted our time with that shit and put out new MacBook Pros!!
Possible reasons:
* It has Bluetooth for your wireless keyboard and mouse, anyway. (Just like the lack of Firewire because USB should be enough.)
* Adding wireless USB would make the battery life even worse.
* Adding wireless USB would require an ultra-wideband chipset and antenna which would be hard to cram into the thin case.
* Adding wireless USB would drive the price up.
* There aren’t enough wireless USB devices for it to be worthwhile (I know, there weren’t “enough” wired USB devices before the iMac, either).