In this week's The Road Warrior Mailbag, a reader going by the Web handle of Colorado, submits a well-argued case advocating his ideal spec. for a MacBook for road warriors, noting that the MacBook Air is definitely not it.

"It's footprint & weight that counts, not thickness," says Colorado, "So, the main feature of the MBA was to solve a problem that didn't exist. While the unit is nice and light, because thickness was the overriding design goal, too many required features needed to be removed."

I pretty much agree, although I could live with the footprint necessary to accommodate a 13.3" display as long as I had enough I/O ports including FireWire and Ethernet, a replaceable battery, and RAM upgrade potential - all missing in the Air.

As Colorado puts it, "Almost all of my camera/video technology revolves around that 1394 port, as does every external hard drive I own. When in a hotel without wireless (and there are a lot of these, everywhere), how does one connect to the Ethernet network while simultaneously plugging in a software dongle?"

Colorado also included a 16-point outline of his idea of the perfect Mac laptop for road warriors. Here is his wish list with my comments and observations interpolated.....

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