MacBook Air.......ARGH!

Ok... I have no shame. I was sitting outside the Apple Store this morning watching the various blogs running down what was announced at MacWorld. The doors opened at 10, I put away my MacBook Pro and moved to one of the store machines with various windows open keeping the info flowing on all the latest and greatest from the big Steve Jobs Keynote.

All looked good, including the MacBook Air until I took a look at some of the specs... sooooo close... yet it has missed the mark in my opinion. At least for the time being, my credit card sits safely parked in my wallet and I will continue to use my boxy little black MacBook.

There are some really cool things Apple has done with the laptop. The size is great, the multi touch controls are cool, and the fact that they have gone waaay green with the MacBook Air is cool. I don't think that it is a bad laptop for everyone.

If size is your main criteria and you don't use a lot of accessories, this could be the machine for you, but as a working photographer, here's why it isn't the machine for me:

1. No firewire... it is apparently USB bootable, but still... I want firewire. With the difference in speed and the $$ I've invested in all the firewire accesories, I don't plan to toss them for a slower USB2 solution.
   
2. No removable battery. Why, why, why... Obviously the designers have never flown cross-country on an airplane with no outlets for charging a laptop. I don't want to be stuck with the battery in the laptop and no way to replace it. We (my wife and I) had one of the original orange and white iBooks (it was my wife's work laptop) and the only problem it ever had was the bolted-in-battery. The specs say five hours of battery life... not that Apple ever makes overly-optimistic claims about their batteries...
   
3. One USB port. So pick one device and plug it in. Or for more than one device you can use a USB hub... oh, you want to use a bus powered device like a hard drive and an EVDO modem on the hub, no problem, you better find a powered USB hub then. That means you better find a plug to use it, too... not too mobile of a lifestyle if you have to travel plug to plug to use more than one accessory at once.
   
4. No ethernet port. Airport is cool, I like Airport, I use Airport, but I also like ethernet. Sure there is an ethernet dongle, it plugs into... you guessed it! The lone USB port.
5. No internal CD/DVD drive. Years ago I owned a laptop that was really small and cool... except that it had no internal CD/DVD drive. It didn't bother me until I tried to balance the laptop and the external CD/DVD drive on the airplane seat tray... it is actually easier to use a 15" or 17" laptop than to fiddle with a smaller laptop and an external drive.
   
6. No ExpressCard slot. I have gotten to like the ExpressCard slot in the MacBook Pro. It adds a lot more functionality than the old PCMCIA slot, and would have gone a long way towards me being able to live without firewire... sigh.....
7. Dinky hard drives. If you opt for the faster solid state drive and want to use Boot Camp you don't have much room left on your hard drive. That goes for the 80gb drive, too.
   
8. 1.6 or 1.8 Core2Duo? Have I gone back in time, isn't that slower than even the entry-level MacBook... no, it is 2008 and it is slower than the $1000 laptop.
9. It's new... I would wait a few months to see what if any issues come up once these laptops make it into the wild. While Apple makes pretty darn good laptops (generally) the first run of each radical new design tends to have some issues, some persistent, others easily fixable. I would wait to see how many of each this laptop has.
   
   
   I was really hoping this was going to be a real replacement to the 12" Powerbook. I was at the Apple Store and ready to throw down the $$ but unfortunately this just isn't the Mac for me. :-(