MacBook Air

A MacBook Air is my recent new laptop. Maybe it appealed to me as I'm already a practiced road bike consumer, where "pay more, get less" is the mantra. I'm already conditioned, I'm not like all the laptop users outhere who are now baffled by this reverse intuitive thinking.

The Air beats my road bike hands down. For under $4k (yup, got the solid state drive and some options), it weighs only 3lbs. Road bikes can't meet that spec. My last laptop was big - 17" screen and heavy. I actually liked the form factor for what I used it for. What I didn't like is that Windows gets really cruddy over time. And it had a slow hard drive, and I don't like slow hard drives. In fact, I don't like them enough, that I spent over $1,000 extra for a smaller SSD option, just so I can say I don't have a hard drive. That's S-M-R-T.

I don't miss a DVD drive yet. What I do like is the following:

- Light.

- 35 second boot. This thing can boot a dozen times in the time it takes my co-workers new Viao with Vista to load up.

- Perfectly acceptable performance for email, browsing, Word, Excel, iPhoto, iTunes, youtube vids, etc.

- Did I mention light and small?

- Nice keyboard.

- Sync'ing with .mac account between that and my iMac at home.

Will I be bothered with only one USB port on the road? We'll see in next few weeks as I'll be travelling.

I know though that on the road I'll appreciate being able to run TrainingPeaks, SRM software, etc. in Windows XP, then go back to Leopard whenever for pictures, email, Office, web.

There's lots of opinions on the web about the machine, but it's sweet to me.