By Prince McLean

Published: 08:00 AM EST

How to Be Thin

Different manufacturers target their own intended market by specializing in one area or another. Sony skimped on CPU performance, graphics resolution, and display size in the Vaio G series to deliver a thin light notebook with a DVD burner, and in doing so scraped the high end of the price comparison. The Lenovo ThinkPad piles on everything from performance to RAM expandability and a full assortment of ports to deliver a full featured machine in a tight but not extremely small package. Panasonic's Toughbook drops features across the board to deliver a very light and thin notebook with a tiny 10.4" screen.

And Apple: it matches the top performance of the ThinkPad, bundles in Bluetooth and WiFi N as standard, delivers a larger 13.3" screen at higher resolution, while matching the ThinkPads weight and remaining thinner at its thickest point than all the other models at their thinnest. And in price, the Air matches the Fujitsu LifeBook, which at 4 pounds and 1.42" thick, is closer to being a full sized machine, and considerably thicker than even Apple's entry level 1" thick MacBook.

Apple also throws in a full featured 1.3 MP video conferencing camera. Many of the ultralights don't include a camera, and those that do, like the Sony and Asus models, commonly use a far poorer quality 0.3 MP unit that won't result in satisfactory pictures. Apple also built in DVI video output allowing the Air to drive a 24" digital display, and analog TV output in addition to the VGA output that most other notebooks settle upon.

What's Missing in the Air

The art of engineering is as much about leaving things out as it is building things on. Apple made some risky decisions with the Air that other manufacturers weren't likely to try anytime soon. If the Air succeeds, expect them to start copying, as indeed they should. That's how the state of the art is pushed.

For example, Apple simplified RAM configuration by making one: 2GB standard, with no room for expansion. That means that the Air comes with enough RAM to be highly usable, while lacking the option to drop in more DIMM cards at some point in the future when 2GB won't seem like very much. Of course at that point, the Air itself will likely be obsolesced by a more powerful version, and third parties will likely start offering a mail in option to solder on higher density chips. The main use for more RAM is running intensive applications, something that nobody with an Air should be planning to do; it's a mobile unit, not a desktop replacement.

How do competitors' compare? They all ship 1GB of RAM, but many of them can't even support more than 1.5GB total. Only the LifeBook and ThinkPad can expand to 4GB, and do so by being physically bigger. The other problem for notebooks not running Mac OS X is that no matter how much RAM you install, Windows only lets you use 3.3GB of it because of its 32-bit limitations. As Fujitsu warns: "When 4 GB of memory is installed in a Genuine Windows Vista system, approximately 3.3 GB is addressable memory; the upper memory is reserved by Genuine Windows Vista for hardware usage."

Apple also doesn't offer a wide range of hard drive options. There are in fact only two: an 80 GB HDD and a 64GB option to use a Flash RAM Solid State Drive at an expensive $999 premium. Of course, users will have the ability to pop open the Air and install their own hard drive as prices of SDD fall and capacities of HDDs rise. Apple doesn't match the 120GB HDD options other makers offer because the MacBook Air uses smaller format drives and the 120GB version of those drives, such as the one used in the iPod Classic, are simply too big to fit in the notebook because they require additional physical platters. Again, the Air is designed to be mobile, not an all encompassing data repository or a film editing workstation.

There's also no option to hang an extended capacity battery unit off the back end of the Air. Presumably, users will need to carry a charger and keep it plugged in whenever they plan to work for longer than 5 hours. Since Apple's battery rating applies to having WiFi on, the actual life you'd get in a plane should be longer. Of course, planes also have power sockets, too.

Apple also dropped additional USB ports, FireWire, and Ethernet ports, expecting users to do their business with a single USB jack. For users who desire the mobility of the Air, not being able to tether to an Ethernet cable seems like a non-problem. Until Apple did it, who could imagine a notebook shipping without an Ethernet port? A variety of other ultralight limitations have been worked around in software for the Air:

• a more capable multi-touch trackpad that goes far beyond what a finger joystick or standard pad can do.
• Remote Disc networking and discovery software that makes an optical disc drive largely unnecessary.
• a Wireless Migration Assistant that magically imports settings and files from another computer.

That package of features gives Apple the simplicity of marketing two MacBook Air configurations: the $1799 base model with a HDD and a high end $3100 model with the fastest processor and futuristic SDD storage. Everyone else is left marketing the many configurations of the s6510 and the X61 and the G-11 alongside their C291NW/G and P1610 and R61e, T61, and X61s. Apple also sells a MacBook and MacBook Pro line. Imagine which model names will make any sense to consumers and be something they can remember.

The Very Hot Air

Even if Apple's MacBook Air wasn't competitive in its raw performance, its graphics display, its weight and size, and its pricing, the fact that its models stick out as well designed machines in easy to understand configurations should make the Air a hot seller.

The fact that Apple will be showcasing the new model in its own white-hot retail stores will also help push Air out the door rapidly. The company's sky-high satisfaction ratings from everything from Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard to the iPhone should also help fuel uptake of the new Air.

The burning question that remains is: what's up next from Apple?