By the way, does anyone know when they are going to start shipping them?

They're already in the mail. Expected arrival Feb 1 for the HDD based models.

But what about for the solid state disks?

AppleInsider indicates that SSD models are still set to ship sometime between Feb. 6th and Feb 8th.

Thanks. Although the 6th is a day I hit the road for
almost two weeks. Oh well.......

INteresting articale - that and the WSJ too - pointing out the pros/cons of the. One thing that piqued my interest was:

That sounds mighty interesting - if it is a replaceable HDD and one could swap in an SSD rather than a HDD it would be tempting in the future.

I am just waiting to see if we actually get any here in Oz soon to give it a mini roadtest and compare to my current dell 12in Latitude D410 and get approval from IT to supply my own laptop...

Not sure about the HDD. I know it's been demonstrated that it's not too difficult to replace the battery.

It actually should be easier in a way. Despite the tight quarters, there are fewer components to worry about in there. Stuff like the RAM being soldered on makes things that much simpler. But it's not designed to be something a user can do, so it may remain pretty difficult.

Here is a photo showing the hard drive (below the guy's hand).

It appears to be as difficult to change as the drives in the Macbook Pros, which are not difficult once you get the case open.

Anyone know the name of the girl that sings in the Apple MacBook Air TV ads?

Yael Naim - New Soul

While I'm admittedly not a Mac fan, I find this laptop especially horrid, from a maintenance and tweaking point of view.

I've used dozens of laptops, and had a couple Sony Vaio's that gave me bad experiences about laptops without optical drives.

All laptops will fail, and some quicker than others, at very inconvenient times. The Vaio's that failed had external optical drives, but I had them stored away and didn't use them very frequently. When the laptops failed, I couldn't find the optical drives, so I couldn't restart the machines with CDs like Knoppix, UBCD, UBCD4Win, or even Win XP install CDs to try to fix the windows install.

I had to open up the Vaios to remove the hard drive (just like the MBA), took it out, slaved it to a desktop, to salvage the data. The lack of an optical drive readily available made it a pain in the rear. I also couldn't reinstall the OS without having to find the optical drives.

So those of you who think the lack of an optical drive is no big deal, make sure you organize your stuff better than I, and keep your optical drive in a safe place that you can get to easily. This seemingly trivial stuff is a real PITA when computer do go wrong.

I hope the bios of the MBA will allow booting from the external optical drive, as that will simplify the install of other OSs or disaster recovery media.

Bottom line though the MBA is a sweet notebook, but there are too many "workarounds" to handle the deficiencies that have been widely discussed here.

Wow, you missed one of the big features of the MBA called Air Disc. You basically are able to share the disc drive from another PC or Mac over the network. The MBA will even be able to boot off of these network drives, to reinstall the OS for example.

http://www.apple.com/macbookair/wireless.html

If the drive were wiped clean, the MBA would still be able to boot from a shared disc over the network. No need to pull it out and connect it to another computer. It's on page 46:

http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/Mac...sers_Guide.pdf

I think it is also possible to boot from a USB thumbdrive, but I haven't tried it.

Now if you don't have another computer's disc drive or the optional external SuperDrive, you're SOL just like your VAIO.

Oh... one other thing, a hardware diagnostic program called "Apple Hardware Test" is "built in" the firmware (EFI). Just restart and hold down the D button and it will startup.

Sorry, the way I read that page is that you can install another OS, but from within Mac OS only. Also, Walter Mossberg's review seems to indicate also that if you want to install Windows, for example, you would need to have the $99 super drive.

There is no magical way to automagically access shared network drives without any OS, unless Apple has some how defeated network protocols and come up with its own BIOS version of network detection and sharing via wifi (highly doubtful).

If the MBA hard drive is wiped clean, there would be no OS to handle network connections and sharing, so how could the MBA access shared network connections? Unless there was a hidden partition that runs an emergency OS with network connections, that would be impossible.

installing windows under boot camp (dual booting) requires a real cd/dvd optical drive (not necessarily apple's). installing mac os x itself or mac software does not and it can be done wirelessly. i'm not sure if windows can be wirelessly installed in vmware fusion or parallels desktop, but if not, it's likely that it will be added in a future release.

actually, that's exactly what they did. macs have efi (not bios) and apple added the ability to connect with a wifi network and look for published drives. when the user selects the network boot disc, the mac establishes a secure connection, transfers a small kernel, boots it, and then it mounts the network drive and pulls down whatever else it needs from the dvd. it's basically an extension of what they were doing for network booting.

there are no hidden partitions. it's in the efi firmware.

Dell rebadged it - it isnt theirs. As noted by yourself. Otherwise I would have done so for you. And it isnt segment leading or pioneering. Not surprising as that is the direct opposite of Dell's business model. If it isnt mass market ie established and mapped technology and product category, they cant make money on it - and they dont bother.

So no, the X1 is not a landmark model in the segment. Sorry.