Now I've had almost a day to recover from my yearly applegism, I thought I'd note a few highlighted thoughts on this hot new gadget. Check out my tweets starting from Wednesday 16 January NZST for a full log of my applegasmic experience.

The Ad is beautiful. I seriously admire apple's marketing team.

See the Ad

Steve jobs pulled it out of an envelope at the keynote too. Very cool!

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This thing is seriously tiny. In the keynote it was compated to a Sony TZ series small laptop:

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The put a whole mac on this tiny board:

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The thickest point of the MacBook Air is thinner than the thinnest point of the Sony.

The SSD (solid state drive) version has 64Gb instead of 80Gb like the regular (magnetic spinning disk) version. Steve said it's "pricey but fast".

They will be shipping in 2 weeks in both the US and in NZ. They will cost USD 1800 in the US and NZD 3000 in NZ. The SSD version is NZD 5140 in NZ.

The battery isn't user-replaceable.

AFAICT The Magsafe connector doesn't have a red/green LED to indicate charge-status.

The ports 'door' is pretty cool. No firewire is annoying, but thems the breaks.

The remote disc borrowing software is pretty cool and has a great UI. Will it allow you install non-Apple OSes remotely? Can you install non-Apple OSes from a USB superdrive?

Trackpad is big and has more features than other macbooks. Will these features be available in all trackpads in the future? When will we see multi-touch iMacs? That is the ultimate user experience. I'll recommend to my grandma that she gets a mac if iMac's come out with touch screens -- multi or single touch.

The operator at MagnumMac in Christchurch was rude and didn't know what a MacBook Air was. Ben said it'll probably be on display in 3-4 weeks, although he might not know.

Time capsule is very cool. Why is 1 TB the largest? It's not big enough for video professionals. Can it be extended with a RAID array or similar? Knowing apple, probably not. :(

The location-finder on the iPhone is interesting. They've tried to set it up to replace a Garmin vehicle-GPS system with technology from google maps, signals from cellphone towers and wifi networks, and geodata of the locations of those signals from Skyhook (who have mapped 23 million wifi hotspots in the US, Canada and recently UK and EU) and traingulation. Sounds great but isn't as fast or accurate as a GPS receiver.

The user interface for dropping pins on the map is very good -- better than google's.