About nine months ago, I acquired a 13-inch MacBook Air. At that point, the first Ultrabooks had been announced but were not yet shipping. Even so, I might have waited, except that the Ultrabooks I'd previewed to that point seemed uninspired--with clunkier hardware than the Air offered and various odd compromises. Some missed the boat on the trackpad; others had lower-quality displays. So I bought a 13-inch MacBook Air configured with a 256GB solid-state drive.

My comments:

Good question – A question with context is always a good way to learn.

In the old days, before there were airplanes, people travelled the world by ship, or boat, if you will. And there were probably only one or two boats a month from, say, London to New York. If you miss your boat today, you’ll have to wait for another week or month.

Hence, you see, missing the boat was a big deal.

By extension, missing the boat also means, figuratively speaking, missing an opportunity.

In the top example, the speaker explained why, due to timing, he/she bought a MacBook Air instead of an Ultrabook. At that time, the Ultrabook wasn’t so good, either.

For example, some Ultrabooks did not have the trackpad – “missed the boat” on that one, meaning that newer versions of the Ultrabook came out on the market soon and they all had the trackpad, plus high-quality displays.

Alright?

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Go to Zhang Xin's column

本文僅代表作者本人觀點，與本網立場無關。歡迎大家討論學術問題，尊重他人，禁止人身攻擊和發布一切違反國家現行法律法規的內容。

About the author:

Zhang Xin（張欣） has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column