Fresh Air

The new Macintosh Air has arrived at Eastgate. It's currently loading applications. First impressions:

• Gorgeous packaging -- including the box. Even including the shrink wrap, which is the best shrink wrap I've ever seen. In the box, the unit nestles in a black velvet-lined tray.
• The geometry is very interesting; some real work has gone into calculating the curves of this case. Someone sweated these details very hard, indeed.
• I expect the solid-state hard drive to be the really important, distinctive part of this device. It's not getting enough attention.
• The relatively small size of the hard disk raises some interesting issues; this is the first time in a long time that a new machine arrives with less space than its predecessor. Instead of reveling in free space, I must carefully consider just what I need to carry.

The Air stakes out a new niche. It gives you connectivity, CPU, an operating system, and your key applications and documents. It's a home away from home. It's an accessory, not your only computer. It's the luxury model of the XO.

I've long thought that, in the future, we'll all carry around big iPods with all our applications and media, and plug them into generic computational docks that will supply bandwidth and standard operating environments in two or three flavors. This is something else: instead of a bundle of data, it's a portable operating environment with a small pile of data and access to the rest through the 'net.

The other day, I saw a quote from a 20-year old student at a British university who said that she and her roomate couldn't sleep unless they could see the little blinking lights on their laptops.

Of course, in three years the SSD hard drive will be 240G instead of 60G, and that might change the equation again.

Finally, the Air should be a terrific notemaking machine. Hello, Tinderbox.