I’ve had my MacBook Air for a few months, so I wanted to write some things about it. Cutting to the chase, for me, it is so far a really great machine that I love. But it’s not for everyone — I think for a lot of people its not a good choice.

Photo from Wikipedia, MacBook Air at 2008 MacWorld

The physical characteristics are all totally cool. It’s light, it’s thin (so thin that it’s actually hard to find a good carry bag for it), and it feels terrific. It’s a clearly different feel to carry it around, it just gets in the way less than most other laptops do.

The screen is so bright and I like the flat chiclet keyboards that the MacBooks (but not the MBPs) ship with. The machine is so silent it makes application startup & switching feel very very quick and painless, even though the machine doesn’t have a fast processor.

I’m not really into the multitouch trackpad, it’s really easy to map gestures to command key combos and only a few applications have support presently.

One real painful feature when you are on the road is there’s no battery life indicator on the outside of the laptop, so you need to open up the machine to work out how much more work you can do.

Things that will turn most people off (but not me the road warrior) are :

1. small internal disk, with 64 Gb you need to manage your space well, leave most of the movies and music at home;
2. limited connectivity options (minimal number of ports). No optical drive, makes it pretty hard to do things like recover from a fatal hardware or o/s failure.

Anyway, I love it, it’s mine and it’s cool, it’s way smaller, lighter, and still provokes double looks and comments on just how thin it is.

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