"I guess that it just seems to me that with the Air, Apple was more concerned with the rather arbitrary title of "world's thinnest" and ignored some very important issues about functionality."

Their design goal was to build the laptop as thin and light as possible. Things like an internal optical drive and removable battery didn't fit with this. It's not unheard of for optical drives to not be included in ultraportables. Of course, none of them spent the time to think up and engineer the ability to borrow another machine's optical drive. No doubt the Dell's of the world will 'innovate' this soon. Also, you can actually find an Apple store if you're having a problem and am in a hurry. The same can't be said for a Dell, HP, etc.

For many people, it is rather uncommon to put an optical disc in and I'm sure that Apple did their market research. The only thing that generally travels with me is a power cable and rarely used USB key. I don't both with extra batteries.

What causes these 10 page long threads is that this is not for everyone. I've seen PC people get openly pissed off that Apple didn't put a removable battery in this.

The WSJ article does a good job of explaining the device. You'll still have plenty of PC people attacking the thing without understanding it though.

When people are convinced that a computer they've never seen is the second coming of christ is that possible?

A lot has been made about the lack of a swappable battery. That's in the "minus" column for me because I actually have the "Dell bay battery" for my Dell laptop - bought for $129, btw. With the bay battery and the stupid extended regular battery, my estimated battery life is 5 hours. Hmm.

OTOH, let's consider the other slightly more normal developers and non-developers at my work... Of the 200 folks I know, exactly two have a spare battery that they use on trips (and I'm including myself).

Three of us have the empower adapter for long flights - and for the 14-16 hour flights to Asia or if you choose to use the optical drive to watch a movie, spare batteries aren't really going to get you through the flight...

Finally, exactly zero people have ever actually replaced their battery because it "went dead".

We make a big thing of the fact that you have to bust out a screwdriver, but I'd propose that it's not a "real" factor for the vast majority of people.

BTW, any one know if the run times they're quoting are based on the SSD drive or a regular HDD?

I think if you were to look, much if not most of such comments are by people who think a computer they have never seen is the coming of the anti-Christ.

I think the Mossberg article laid it out pretty well. To keep the weight down, most manufacturers cut the screen size and keyboard. Apple kept them the same and cut peripherals. Seems like another choice in the market for those who would want that option. Im one of them, although it is also because I greatly prefer MacOS.

As long as people don't use personal insults/attacks they can post pretty much whatever they want to.

-David

Amen to that

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.

Excellent analysis. I could not have said it better myself!

All very good points. It also depends on what you are using the machine for. I would be quite happy with my Asus eee actually but I am having two problems with it. First, the Open Office Powerpoint equivalent just wont work with my presentations. Second, I have had some difficulties with VPN. The latter I can, and will fix I suspect. But basically, I use a computer for the following when traveling:

1) email - I use both Entourage and Outlook (or even Evolution)with Exchange
2) web access
3) Powerpoint - making presentations
4) Working on Word documents or the odd spreadsheet
5) Skype

I could also use it for picture editing and I could also use it for my music. But I dont often do either and am happy to have them on a home machine. I have a Dell X1 that has most of the peripherals and ports you mentioned and weighs a bit less than 3 pounds. But I really dont like XP as well and in particular, I like being able to start X11 and access our Linux machines at work. I realize you can ssh from Windows and have tried some of the emulators but I just find them more of a hassle than doing it in X11. So with these uses, I dont have much of an issue with the Air. My main one is that it would have been nice to have a second USB, but I will manage. I will probably end up carrying the Asus if I just need mail and web, like on personal trips and the Air if I am making presentations or have a lot of wordsmithing to do.

Your fault for bying the wrong computer. On my Panasonic Y5, I get 8 hours honest battery life with the standard battery, never midn adding on an extended one.

Comparing to a dumb Dell is the worst form of setting up a weak strawman. not helpful at all. Dell is not exactly segment leader in ultraportables.

Has anyone noticed the resemblence between Air and Intel's Metro Notebook concept released May last year? Metro achieved 0.7" thickness, 0.06" less than Air. It weighs in at 2.25 lbs, a more reasonable weight for ultrathin ultramobile. I can't find details on other specs.

Intel is not in the business of marketing and selling notebook computers. They would have been a big hit if they do sell it.

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Excuse me motorhead. Have had Dell x1 for 3 years, weighs 2.50 lbs, has delivered exc work all over the world and was made, I believe, by Samsung. R.I.P, not in the lineup now... but it's working this moment at top form.

I get 2+ hrs on the light battery and 4+ on the heavy (2.85 lbs total). I appreciate the option of using one or the other.

I hope Dell cooks up a new super ultra--a half eee and half thin-client like HP is baking. Or maybe HP (remember their great sub-min laptops!) will...

1 lb, 1gb flash drive, constant connection to yer data via wifi or mobile service, at least 10" screen & reasonable graphics, for $600 US. Asus will certainly go there. And my weary back will sing their praises!

I have one too. Excellent ultralight notebook. I still carry it now if I dont need to do as much as when I carry my MacBook and need to cut space and weight.

Yeah, you are not the only one that noticed it:

http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travel...en-you-before/

I'm convinced Intel did the hard work on the Air, and Apple just designed the outside of it. The specs of the Metro are identical to the new Macbook...