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So what are the tradeoff? The "battery":http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/01/macbook-air-lac.html isn't removable. Instead, to get new one, you have to return it to Apple. For me, that's no big deal. Once you get to five hours or so, I don't have extra batteries and haven't had them for a long time. The other thing is the lack of an optical drive. While that was once a big deal, with big hard drives, I normally put Mac Office and everything else on the hard drive. Now the drive on this one is tiny because it is flash, but Office is now just 500MB. The other old use of opticals was to watch movies, but I've pretty much completely converted to watching .AVI and other things (dare I saw Bit Torrent?), so that's not a problem or rip a DVD for a backup. Final thing is lack of an Ethernet port. That's only an issue where there isn't Wifi and where I am right now they are pretty much everywhere. it does lack a PCMCIA or other port, but I haven't used these in a long time either. The ubiquitious USB seems to have replaced PCMCIA. Only one USB port does hurt, so there will be a big market in 4:1 USB hubs I think, but that is how I use my MacBook Pro today, my docking station is in effect the USB hub. One thing you should probably put in your kit bag if you have this baby is a portable Wifi access point. I have one from Linksys that turns any wired port into wireless.

By the way it comes with a 60GB hard drive or 64GB of flash. The other cool feature is doing multitouch like the iPod touch. That is a pretty cool feature. The thing is definitely "expensive":http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/wa/RSLID?nnmm=browse&node=home/shop_mac/family/macbook_air with the 1.6GHz, 2GB, 80GB hard drive going for $1800 and the 64GB solid state drive going for a cool $3100.

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