People are writing about why they won't buy a MacBook Air and most of the media is dwelling on features that the MacBook Air lacks which if it had, it would not be a MacBook Air but a MacBook "Lug". Others write that people who buy the MacBook Air must have more money than brains because of the price/feature ratio that they themselves concoct.

I recently wrote about my deciding on buying a MacBook Air. The article was somewhat inconclusive so I want to set the record straight - I will definitely buy a MacBook Air! But not just yet. Okay, so why is that.

All right, I have your attention. But I'm perfectly serious. You see, I like to get a new notebook every two years or so, which is sufficient time for the older model to seem laggard compared to the latest and greatest hardware....

....the MacBook Air,.... I'm skeptical.

....even if I could accept a 13.3-inch screen as adequate for my purposes, what about the 80GB hard drive? Well, my MacBook Pro has a 160GB drive, and there's only about 40GB empty....

Being confined to a wireless connection might be acceptable in many situations, but did Apple forget that some hotels still offer strictly wired Internet in their rooms?....

On the other hand, I realize that there are many people in our audience who would not suffer from its feature omissions. For them, the MacBook Air's light weight and good looks may be just the ticket.

But not for me.

The MacBook Air is finding its way into wanting hands and some early benchmarks have been tallied. There's two main differences between the two default MacBook Airs you can buy - a 1.6GHz vs. 1.8GHz processor and an 80GB hard drive vs. a 64GB solid state drive. The price difference may be $999; it's up to you whether or not the following differences are worth that to you.

CPU performance in the 1.8GHz model is marginally better than the 1.6GHz. I doubt you expected 200MHz to matter much, anyway. But it's the hard drive vs. solid state comparison that people were most interested in......

Know that Apple ad where the PC calls us to complain because we wrote that the fastest notebook running Windows was a Mac? Don't expect a sequel. Apple's new ultraportable isn't dog-slow running Windows, but it's not a greyhound either, even compared to other thin and light notebooks.

Storage capacities of portable Macs have been steadily on the rise, even though they lag somewhat behind those of desktop models. These days, you can get an off-the-shelf MacBook with as much as 160GB of storage (with a build-to-order option that pushes capacity to 250GB).

The MacBook Air is a departure from that trend of expanding storage. If you're due to receive the new laptop, which began shipping this week , you may feel like like someone forced to cram all the furniture from a five-bedroom house into a studio apartment.....

If using a third-party (non-Apple) 802.11n wireless router that has out-of-date router firmware with your MacBook Air, you may experience issues with Remote Disc, Migration, or Remote Install Mac OS X.

Products affected
MacBook Air
Some third-party routers with out-of-date firmware
Solution

Make sure the firmware on your router is up-to-date. Contact the manufacturer of the router to obtain the latest firmware for that device.

Well, apparently there's some interest in the MacBook Air…and not just from the guy sitting next to me, ogling it in a somewhat creepy manner.

There were some questions in response to my original Q&A post that I figured I should probably answer, and I have some more personal observations I want to mention, too.

So click on for more of my brilliant insight on the miniscule Mac.

And dude, stop looking at it like that. Seriously.

MacBook Air users might need to move their new ultrathin laptops to keep bits moving to and fro, Apple Inc. said in a note on its support site, just one of several problems posted now that the new portable has started shipping.

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