Love is in the Air, or Hot Air (Air Under Pressure)?

Since yesterday there’s a lot of talk about the new MacBook Air.

At the risk of being blamed by the Mac fans, I’d like to mention the following (and thanks to Peio for the useful link):
– the battery of the notebook is built-in (a trade-mark of Apple?), and so in one year, you may have to send the computer for replacement of the battery at Apple (and that will cost $$).
– the notebook is a very low-class in terms of specifications, and costs about twice or three times as much as the “so much thicker (only 8 mm more!)” MacBook, and same price difference with the Dell XPS M1330;
– the fact that it’s thinner really has nothing to do with weight, and no wonder Steve Jobs talks only about thinner / thicker, which if you think about it, is not the biggest feature of a notebook.
– there’s no built-in Ethernet support

You can watch Steve Jobs here (watch it after 55th minute). He mentions “thin”, “thinner”, “thick” as if it is the most important feature of any notebook.

But let’s ask the potential customer:
– will you ever mail your notebook in one of these envelopes, that you have in the office?
– do you want 1.6 GHz Intel Core Duo, or you’d prefer something better?
– do you want only 80 Gb slow drive (4200 rpm) or you’d prefer the standard 5400 rpm, or even 7200 rpm (Dell has 160 Gb 7200 rpm at no price increase?
– is 1 USB port enough for you?
– the MacBook Air has no optical drive, and if you want an external one that charges from the USB port, leaving you with no USB ports at all (Dell’s XPS M1330 has built-in CD/DVD burner)?
– what is the durability of the aluminum case? We hear it is recyclable, but does that mean we’ll throw it away soon?

Or in other words – on the second day, after reading messages that Steve Jobs is a God, I think we could become sober, and acknowledge that if he is a God, he’s a God of PR and marketing. The MacBook Air seems, to use the Bulgarian term, to be air under pressure.

Hope this doesn’t sound very pessimistic, and I know the Mac fans will not like me for what I say, but I kind of feel Steve Jobs is trying to create something new every year, and this just doesn’t happen this year with the MacBook Air 🙂

Or, as a colleague said, “Yes, Apple introduced the MacBook Air today. This is a light version of a Mac–about three pounds. It is also light in the sense that if you buy the version with solid state disk, your wallet will be light about $3,000.”

Quite true.

HotAir calls it “Anorexic.” I like this.