This is a good point but it also speaks to the larger issue I have with the Air at the conceptual level, thus I don’t need to have used an Air to come to this conclusion but I sincerely hope you have a ball with your Air, it is undeniably cool. ^

For those who will not consider any OS other than Mac OS you can stop reading.

As I plan to make this my last signifcant post on the subject I made it a doozy.

As I have said before, I have little to no brand loyalty. If something works better for me and is a reasonable value then I will try it. I say this in preparation for again discussing the Sony SZ because I think that the two are similar and target much of the same demographic.

I talk here about the SZ not to try and re-enforce my buying decision, or because I think Sony is such a great company [I don’t] but because I spent a couple of months dispassionately searching for a laptop that best met all [or most] of my needs.

Let me say at this point that if in the next year or so [I have had my SZ for 2 years now] Dell, or Toshiba, or even Apple comes up with a laptop that better meets my needs then I will buy it.

In promoting the Air, Apple and their flacks in the press go to great lengths to tell us how they decided not to compromise their thin-n-lite the way everyone else did by going with an 11 or 12 inch screen. Well, congratulations, Sony came to that same decision three years ago when they gave the first SZ a 1/4" thin 13.3" LED screen.

Many people here have told of how they rarely need to remove their batteries. Fine, but from my own experience I find that I am not so much changing batteries on the fly as I am configuring my laptop for the day. With the SZ I have the choice to put in the 3-4 hour slimline battery if I know it will be a light day or to put in the extended 6-7 hour battery because it will be a long day of computing or because I am traveling. And if I didn’t want to spend the $300 Sony charges for their extended battery I can go to the aftermarket and save some money.

The point is with the SZ I have the choice.

Performance? Well, because of that extra 1/2" of thickness the SZ can incorporate the appropriate cooling to run a full-bore Intel Core2Duo 2.16 and up to 4 GBs of RAM.

Then there is the optical drive. I understand that most thin-n-lites don’t have an optical drive and fine. But I absolutely have to have one and it has to be built-in. I refuse to carry a separate optical and/or hard drive that can get lost or banged around and I have to have both large storage capacity and redundancy for protection. The SZ with a DVD burner and a 160 GB 7200 RPM HD provides that, and all in one neat, light, little package. I also freely admit that I rely on the optical drive to watch DVD movies and with the drive onboard I don’t have to worry about having to rip DVDs to my HD before I leave on a trip.

I also rely heavily on a 32-bit cardbus CF reader. With 8 GB CF cards neither Firewire nor USB 2.0 can transfer data to my laptop fast enough so I have to have either a cardbus enabled ExpressCard slot or a PCMCIA slot and the Sony SZ happens to have both.

Next I need a robust graphics solution as I run three CAD/CAM programs on my laptop. While something like the Intel 950 or x3100 will work with AutoDesk, it will grind down with something like Form-Z. Enter the Sony SZ with switchable graphics, integrated Intel 950 for long battery life and discreet nVidia 8400 with 128 MB of dedicated VRAM for performance – a perfect solution IMHO.

Ports, I’ll tell you about ports, I can’t count how many times in the last two years that I have used the Firewire port to connect my SZ to a digital videocam and a high speed scanner and many’s the time I would have been SOL without at least two USB ports.

And last but not least - connectivity. Believe it or not I have in the past two years had to use the SZ’s built-in 56.6k dial-up modem, the Gigabit Ethernet connector, the built-in WiFi and the built-in WWAN. In the case of the modem and WWAN, without each of those solutions in each situation would not have been able to connect to the Internet and there would have been consequences for that.

Now, after reading all of that my point is not that the SZ is the greatest thing since sliced bread [though it may be]. In fact both Dell and Asus have since come out with laptops with similar specs and I would be making the same argument for either of them as well.

My point – the SZ with its 13.3" LED screen, built-in optical drive, user removable battery, large capacity HD, Exp34 and PCMCIA slots, 1394, USBx2, RJ-45, RJ-11, VGA, audio-in/audio-out, and built-in MemoryStick/SD/SDHC/MMC reader still only weighs 3.7 lbs, goes from 1" thick at the top to 3/4" thick at the bottom, and has the exact same footprint as the Air.

With all of the compromises, all of the important features that the Air leaves off, is all of that really worth saving 1/2" in thickness and .7 pounds in weight? Apple could have made the Air just a bit thicker and included some of these important missing features and still have been thinner than the SZ or TZ, just not quite as thin in absolute terms - thus it strikes me that being arbitrarily thin was more important to Apple than was functionality.

Seriously, is there anyone out there who will carry a 3 lb laptop but honestly will not carry a 3.7 lb laptop?

Again, as a style and design exercise the Air is really cool. As a latest-n-greatest tech toy [which I am not immune to] the Air is really cool. As a lightweight but still serious computer the Air compromises far too much performance and usability in exchange for ½” and .7 lbs.

As an Architect you might understand that I tend to see a lot of design which is mostly fluff but disguised and sold as substance, which might explain my reaction to the Air. Also, I have a couple of very good friends who are Mac-heads and my posts here are really just recapitulations of conversations we have had on the same subject.

Cheers.