(and before any flame wars start, this is also a joke)

2 ft “thin” eh? :)

I did think this was a very funny parody. I also think that the Macbook Air is a rather ridiculously expensive device for what you get and would never buy one. Just pointing out that mathematically speaking it is much thicker to use paper. Don’t believe me that someone would use that much paper for stuff which can be done digitally? Walk into a school…

Ahh you fell into the Megabyte trap that computer manufacturers lay. If you look closely, there’s a little superscript “2″ after the specifications for the hard drive. Upon scrolling, you find this:

1GB=1 billion bytes. Actual formatted capacity less.

So… Let’s say we use your formula but instead use 64,000,000 bytes as our starting point. That gives us 62,500 usable space. Now we all know that you can print out source/object code, so more appropriately we should factor in the entire storage of the drive including the operating system. Therefore, I charge that when printed, the contents of a full MacBook Air would be:

If a sheet of paper = 0.5 mb, then 62,500/0.5 = 125,000 sheets of paper. Then using our incredibly thin tracing paper (0.05mm thick):

125,000*0.05 = 6250 mm thick, about 2 feet thick.

Got it? :-)

You see: you are comparing the wrong models. You are using the single-unit model, when in fact many reams should be compared instead.

According to Ray Larson of Berkley, one printed paper can hold approximately 5kb. However, to be more generous let’s say that a single printed sheet can hold half of a MB.

The default Macbook Air ships with an 80 gb hard drive. However, for the sake of the comparison, let us assume you go with a solid state disk (which would include similar quality controls to paper), which is 64 gb.

1 gb = 1024 mb. Therefore, 64 gb * 1024 = 65536 mb.

Let us assume that half of that space is used for the operating system and applications. Thus, we are left with 32768 mb to store documents on.

If a sheet of paper = 0.5 mb, then 32778/0.5 = 65536 pages of paper.

Generally accepted is that a sheet of standard paper is 0.1 mm thick. However, to give you the benefit of the doubt, I will say that it is 0.05 mm thick.

65536*0.05=3276.8 mm thick

Now, the MacBook Air is 19.4 mm thick at it’s thickest point. 3276.8 – 19.4 = 3257 mm. So, your device must actually be 3257 mm thick to achieve similar functionality to the Macbook Air. Busted!