MacBook Air

[music | Public Image Ltd. - Same Old Story]

I think this machine defines the fine line between "Apple Fan" and "Apple Fanatic", so here are some first thoughts on the Macbook Air in disorganized bullet-point fashion:

• The very thing keeping from an iPhone (one of the biggies), that it turns into a $400 doorstop because you can't replace the battery, carries over to laptops now, x5.
• External CD/DVDs suck, since you have to carry them all the time. 90% of the time you don't need one, until you find yourself in a motel room in Dumpwater, FL at 3am with the word "FUCK" breaking out in hives across your forehead
• No wired ethernet? Next. Actually, here's a good point, my MacBook, and others around me, can't get DHCP on my office's wireless LAN, PCs work fine, but I have to be plugged in until I can be bothered to figure out why.
• I would constantly feel as if I was going to hammer my fingers through the machine into my desk while typing, and actually might
• I don't trust my iPod hard drive to hold my music. Why would I trust one to hold every damn important file I own in the world? Backup schemes are great until you're on the road for 3 weeks and the drive dies on the plane. While waiting a couple hours for some Genius to hand me a new drive for my Pro, I watched them non-chalantly toss dead iPods on a pile and hand a new one to whatever quivering-with-rage customer and move on to the next dead iPod.
• So that means you have to spend an extra grand to buy the 16GB downgrade to solid state. neat. To be honest, I've had my 30GB iPod for a couple years, and it hasn't died, yet. But I don't rely on it either, Murphy isn't gunning for me yet

That's the bad, what about the AWESOME?

• LED Display, this could be really, really nice. Time will tell but things are going the right way
• This one's been overlooked by everyone I've seen discuss the device, which isn't many people: If the only CD/DVD is USB2, and you can presumably reload the OS, that means Apple now has firmware that will let you boot from USB2 devices. I would love to see this back-ported so I can use Bootcamp this way on the Mac Pro and macbook I already have.
• 802.11n, as long as the firmware on this can be updated if there's a change before it gets ratified, awesome. If you have to take it in, that sucks.

In short, the next person who says I should just go drop for one of these is going to get my "Old and Clunky" MacBook across the head. "There, see, if that was a MacBook Air, you'd be in a whole lot less pain, and my laptop would be in a thousand pieces on the floor, so it would be lose-lose, now go screw, and get a bandaid for god's sake".