Thin air

Apple has come out with a new laptop. Everyone who sees it gets ecstatic. (By "everyone" I mean "I", btw.) It is slim. It is beautiful. It is portable. It is useless. For me, that is.

I really hope Apple sells a lot of them, especially the model with solid state memory. I want it to succeed, and I would really like to have one myself - but I will not buy one. Is it the price? No.

It is the harddisk. It simply is too small. I want to live omnia mea mecum, and I cannot possibly fit all my files on only 80 G and even less the 64 G that the sold state model offers. I would have to have an external harddisk as well. And an external optical drive. And it will all be heavier than buying a simple standard Macbook.

That is the biggest problem I see with it.

The second problem is smaller, but looks bigger. That is, the screen looks bigger. Not only that but it is too big. I do not want a 13.3" screen. 12" is more than enough. It is not because it is lighter, but because it fits better wherever one puts it. I do not need those extra 28 square inches, so why would I carry them around?

Update I: Gizmodo has a comparison between the Macbook Air and a number of other really small laptops. It seems increasingly ridiculous to just look at one dimension - how thick it is.

Update II: This is probably an excellent case for wait and see. The prices of solid state memories seem to be dropping like stones. In six months, either the price of the solid state MBA will have dropped by half or the amount of memory will have doubled or both. Perhaps.