Now that Macworld Expo has come and gone, and the new Apple subnotebook turned out to be a seriously handicapped machine that doesn't interest me in the slightest with regard to owning one (although it's a fascinating engineering exercise) I'm back on the horns of my dilemma as to what to do about upgrading to a MacIntel machine.

I've managed to hold out, quite happily I might add, in Power PC land for these first 24 months of the MacIntel era and haven't until recently felt in the slightest inconvenienced, but the inevitability is finally setting in that it's time to make a move at last. The provisional tipping point for me was always going to be when I needed to run a software application that wasn't supported by Power PC, and that has arrived in the form of MacSpeech's forthcoming new Dictate dictation software based on heretofore PC-only Dragon Naturally Speaking....

I had been waiting for Macworld to see what would emerge in the form of the much-anticipated Mac subnotebook, but the MacBook Air is a big disappointment for me in the context of my own computer needs, and not a machine I would remotely consider as a new workhorse system. What I had been hoping for was something along the lines of an updated and Intel-based 12-inch PowerBook - a full-fledged computer with a full range of connectivity, reasonable expandability and memory capacity, and definitely a user-replaceable battery. the MacBook Air fails on all these counts, so I'm counting it out. It may find a market, but not with users who need a subnotebook that can serve as a primary machine.

So the ball is back in the MacBook/MacBook Pro court, and frankly I'm having great difficulty deciding between a middle model 2.2 GHz white MacBook and the base 15-inch MacBook Pro.

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