Does it cause a craving for mustard?

Here’s how it goes: You walk a mile or so to the metro. You stand on the platform waiting, then stand on the train for 20 minutes, then climb the stairs and walk another half mile or more. Then your next destination for the day is another walk, metro ride (hey, maybe you’ll get a seat this time!), more stairs, and another walk. And then there’s the trip home. Of course, you’re carrying a book and maybe other stuff as well, and you’re doing this every day. A 2-pound difference in laptop weight is a big difference.

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past 24-odd hours, you will have heard about the new Macbook Air ultra-slim laptop from Apple. Since everyone else is talking about it, I thought I would join in the fun.

Enter the Apple MacBook (hot)Air. I was hoping for a return to smaller (not thinner). Smaller would have meant more portability, more computing availability (how many users NOW have their MacBooks or MacBook Pros with them ALL THE TIME?), more customers, more face-time with potential Mac fans among the unwashen Windows heathen, and perhaps trading in only a few pixels in screen real-estate to pull it off. Instead, we got an overpriced ‘concept car’ with the safety glass traded in for non-functional style.

Yes, I said it, non-functional style. What about it is ‘non-functional’, you ask? Let me turn that around to you with another question: What do you get for your ‘Air’ money that you don’t get for much less cash in the form of a current MacBook? That’s right — NOTHING.

If Apple wanted something truly marketable to their real audience (not the 6-figure executives who will be toting this ‘Queer Eye for a Straight OS’ Wilma-Deering-wanna-be), they would have rolled us a 10-inch diagonal screen with 1024×768 pixels, longer battery life than the ’standard’ MacBooks, an external ‘Air’-like optical drive, and a full complement of ports that don’t make me have to search around to figure out which Mag-Safe cord goes to which Mag-Safe computer.

I want something halfway between the current MacBook and the now-infamous OQO. If Apple isn’t going to be the one to deliver it to us, then I may end up tired enough to go try seeing what the Linspire folks have in the way of an Adobe Illustrator clone in their C-N-R (Click-N-Run) library.

The failing of the Air is more obvious. Anyone who needed a reasonably light machine with good power but not cutting edge specs could have bought a Macbook (not the Pro, the regular ones). I’m typing this on one and it’s about 5 lbs and the battery has always lasted about 4 or 5 hours for me. Same size screen…. same basic specs. For several hundred dollars less. Now, I get that the Air is 2.5 lbs lighter… but really, how many people can carry 2.5lbs… but buckle under 5?

The issue for the Air is that anyone who has wanted a small, medium powered Macbook of reasonable weight has been able to get one for awhile. A few people who just have to have the ultracool design will ante up for this as might people who are thinking about the black Macbook ($1499 with 1G RAM) since the price difference is minimal at that point. And, really, that’s all the Air is… the new top of the Macbook line.

It really is the design. Furthermore, it’s the world’s first usable solid-state laptop. Ive shown this thing to users and they all want one. It’s an IDEAL PowerPoint machine. One cord, thats all. It weighs 3 pounds (when you lug around scientific texts all day along with your laptop, pad and paper, etc — any weight savings is an important one).

I also agree on the battery. I’ve had my MacBook 2 years and I leave it plugged in more often than I should. No battery problems. If there is a problem, I am sure that Apple Retail Genius folk can replace it on-site while you wait like an iPhone battery (or thats how it should work…)

This is like owning a german car. You’re either going to hack it (self repair DIY) or take it back for maintenance (what apple expects /// arguably, the whole Macintosh line is/was designed around this concept).

So, really, I think after the Solid State model outsells the Hard Disk model (that’ll take over a year), then we’ll see what happens. Perhaps a 12″ all flash model is in the wings; they have to start somewhere. It took how many nanos to get flash ram this cheap for a laptop?

I mostly use my Sharp for word processing, blogging, and building a wiki–all pretty simple. If it were a Mac I’d use it to develop Flash in Keynote and might want PhotoShop as well, especially for trips that last weeks.

I think I connected the Sharp to Ethernet once. I use the optical drive occasionally to watch movies when I don’t feel like getting the TV out of the closet. I use one USB port occasionally, for my thumb drive. So by far the most important considerations in my laptop are weight, wifi reception, battery life, weight, sturdiness, and weight.

The MacBook Air is half a pound lighter than the Sharp and costs roughly the same. And it’s a Mac. I could do my Keynote development work away from home, and, very importantly, I could use Keynote for my on-the-road presentations.

I’m anticipating a three-week trip later this year and dread being stuck with Windows the whole time. While one of the cheap Linux-based sub-notebooks would be handy, I’ve already got an iPhone for basic email and surfing. Plus my need for Keynote is unlikely to go away soon. So a Mac ultra-portable has a niche.

I understand how techies would sneer at the Air, because it *is* feeble as computers go. However, as an ultraportable it really doesn’t seem that bad. I’ll be keeping an eye on it as my Sharp ages. I’ll be especially interested in its battery life.

I’m sorry, but for $1800, it BETTER be able to edit my photos and fetch my coffee. Especially given that that my main workhorse for photo editing and whatnot is a Dell Inspiron (you know, bottom of the line) that I just performed a RAM upgrade on.

The casual user can make do with a $299 Asus EeePc, which rather than fitting in a manilla envelope can be crammed into a coat pocket.

Coolest thing about the AIR: When all the downsides finally drive you insane, you can snap it over your knee.