Airless But Not Touchless

A number of friends, acquaintances, and even complete strangers have been spontaneously singing the praises of the new MacBook Air to me in the last couple of days. Jason Calacanis, Internet millionaire, bought three - one with the SSD drive and two with hard drives and he loves them. A complete stranger (a biotech researcher) came up to me at lunch yesterday to rave about his SSD Air. He's particularly fond of the keyboard. The consensus seems to be, best notebook ever. Oddly none of the MacBreak Weekly regulars bought Airs. And even though I needed a new notebook, I didn't either. I'm giving TWiT Senior Producer, Dane Golden, my original black Macbook so he can update the feeds at home. To replace it I opted for a white MacBook with a 250GB hard drive and 4GB third-party RAM. Total cost: US$1642. The MacBook is two pounds heavier, several times thicker, and doesn't have the beautiful LED backlit screen, but the new Santa Rosa chipset is much faster, it has twice the RAM and three times the storage, and boasts a Superdrive. Oh yeah, and it cost $100 less and I can use my spare battery to get 50% longer battery life. True, it lacks the wow factor, but I added a beautiful Gelaskins painting by Nanami Cowdroy to the lid and now it's pretty stylish and a heck of a lot more powerful. I know my friends love their Airs. And I probably would too if I'd spent that kind of money for one, but I guess I'm a more value conscious consumer than I thought, even though I immediately blew the savings and then some on a 32GB iPod Touch. I guess one way or another Steve is going to get my money. -sigh-