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Comment by ardit33 | Hacker News Reader

I don't know, but what's the big hoopla about it? It is very thin, and light, but at $1,800 you are paying very dearly for a machine like that it is not that powerful.

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The power of it is being able to easily take it wherever you want. Right now I have a very powerful Dell Inpiron 9400, and it is heavy. I only take it on major trips. With the Mac Air, I can easily take it with me whenever I need it without a second thought. Also, I want to use if for remote coding, and with sbcl/emacs/slime, it is plenty powerful.

Killer feature: extreme portablility with very good power.

And.. It is simply beautiful. It looks like a dream from a futuristic scifi movie. In fact, this may be the most beautiful computer to date - but I have to see it in person to confirm. (I still remember going crazy over the Next computer when it came out)

Yes, it's portable, but I'm kinda curious about how it would be to work with it over long periods of time. Considering how thin it is, I would think that there would be a pretty serious learning curve when it comes to typing. If, in fact, the keyboard is implemented so that you don't feel like you're typing on the tabletop, this will probably be a winner due to the weight savings. I could care less if they make it any smaller, if the regular MacBook only weighed a couple pounds, I would probably own one right now.

I would this would be a benefit, having a keyboard so thin it feels like typing on the tabletop. Wouldn't that lessen the risk of RSI?

Yes, I have that dell too, and it is powerful and heavy. But, for 1800, you can buy that, and the Asus Eee PC, so you can have them both, one very powerful machine, and one very portable one, for even cheaper than the Mac air.

The Eee is ugly, slow, and gimpped, so I wouldn't consider that a very good option. Unless all you do is surf the web and check email (and absolutely nothing else).

I looked at the Eee, and the keyboard is undersized as is the screen. I'm not sure if you could really be fully productive with it.

It's simple and thin like the iPod. If price wasn't an option and I could have more than one laptop I'd certainly want one. I can fit my iPod Nano in my wallet. The Air looks like it could fit in a folder.

Weight is more important for me, though. I don't honestly need anything extremely thin.

I bet with the optional solid state drive, it will seem very, very fast compared to the other Macbooks.

It will also seem very, very expensive.

The funny thing is that this would be the least expensive laptop I've ever bought to date. My first laptop cost $5000, as did the following 3. My very powerful dell was around $3000.

I see now that it is $3100 for the laptop including the 64GB flash memory - not an additional $3100 as the original article said. So it's not as expensive as I thought.

I have to agree with you... Apple, I feel, did not take the "this is the next step in mobile computing and we're leading the way" approach here. It's just a thin, albeit gorgeous, computer.

I'm not saying I don't want one, of course.

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