I’ve been a loyal Apple fan since 1985, and have bought at least one of almost every new computer they’ve produced — especially the MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops, which first arrived on the scene around 1993. So I was as excited and titillated by the rumors of the MacBook Air as everyone else during the days leading up to the Steve Jobs keynote presentation at MacWorld. Well, I’ve seen the presentation, watched the demo video on Apple’s website, read lots of reviews, and did a lot of thinking. Maybe I’ll change my mind when/if a second-generation Air machine appears in a year or two, but for now I’ll pass; ironically, I had the same reaction when the very first Mac appeared in 1984, and didn’t change my mind until the Mac Plus appeared a year later (with 512 kilobytes of RAM!)

I’m sure Steve Jobs couldn’t care less whether an individual geek like me buys an Air or not; and I’m not trying to shift public opinion, or persuade you to change their plans if you’ve already decided you will buy an Air. If it works for you, that’s fine; but if you’re still on the fence, wondering what to do, then perhaps my analysis/evaluation will be useful to you. Basically, I decided that while it would be nice to have a machine three pounds lighter than the “standard” 15-inch MacBook Pro, that wasn’t enough to justify all of the features I’d have to sacrifice. They include things like a slower CPU (1.8 GHz instead of 2.8 GHz); less RAM (2 GB instead of 4 GB); no optical CD/DVD disk; no Firewire port; no Ethernet port; 64-80 GB hard disk, instead of 160-250 GB on the standard MacBook Pro; no replaceable batteries; only 5 hours of battery life, not much more than the 3 hours one typically expect on a standard MacBook; and no PC card slot. One or two of these factors could be overlooked, or could be considered a tradeoff for the obvious benefit of getting a machine so much thinner and lighter; but all of these sacrifics, taken together, were just too much for me.

By the way, please don’t consider this to be an “official” summary or review of the Air’s features; I may have overlooked something, and I may have gotten one or two details wrong. If you really need to make a point-by-point comparison, check out an industry trade-journal review like MacWorld’s “MacBook Air: What You Need to Know.”

One of the items that hasn’t been mentioned very often is the PC card slot; maybe it’s not important to most people, but I find it invaluable because it supports the high-speed GPRS wireless modem that I got from Verizon. If you have access to WiFi, that’s great; but I frequently visit client offices whose networks don’t allow access by “outsiders” like me. In fact, even if they did, I don’t want those clients snooping at my email messages, at the Web sites I’m browsing, or anything else they might be able to find out. Also, when I travel on business, I’m reluctant to spend $10 a night to access the WiFi in my hotel room; nor do I want to spend $5-10 to access the “public” WiFi in airports, just so I can pick up my mail. And try accessing the Internet when you’re taking the Metroliner from New York to Boston or Washington.

Ubiquitous Internet access would be important for another reason, considering the Air’s storage limitations: if you don’t have enough room on your local hard disk to store all of your documents and files, then one possible option is to store some of the files somewhere on the Internet. There are more and more examples of this alternative today, ranging from email (Gmail, Yahoo mail, Apple’s mail, and others) to free and nearly-free server-based storage mechanisms like Apple’s iDisk. I’ve used up about 40 gigabytes of local disk storage, for example, to store my 13,750-picture photo archive with Apple’s iPhoto program. But for a mere $50 per year, I can get a “pro” account with Flickr, and enjoy unlimited storage for my photos. This is not an abstract theory; I’ve already done it, and Flickr hasn’t squawked even once about the massive number of photos I’ve uploaded. But if I can’t get access to the Internet, then I can’t access Flickr, and I can’t see my photos. Bummer!

This raises a related issue: you either need to be able to put all of your stuff on one computer, or you need a convenient, hassle-free way of synchronizing the information you’ve got on multiple computers. The obvious mechanism for such “synchronization” is, as discussed above, to put as much of your data as possible in one single place, on the Internet (and hope that it’s secure and backed-up, which is a whole separate discussion!). Another example is the use of IMAP-based, rather than POP-based email; I can get my email on my iPhone, my laptop, and my desktop computer with Apple’s IMAP-based mail program, and everything is automatically synchronized. Not only that, Apple’s .Mac service also synchronizes my browser bookmarks, my email address book, and probably a few other things that I don’t even pay attention to. It’s all great; but it depends on Internet access, and without that PC card slot on the Air laptop, there would be too many situations where I wouldn’t be able to synchronize.

Before the details of the Air were revealed, I had already started thinking about the likelihood (based on the rumors already circulating) about how I could cope with a hard disk that had only a third of the capacity of my current 250-GB disk. Aside from the Internet-based option discussed above, I had another strategy: I thought I would just get one of the many tiny Firewire-based external hard disks, and use that to store my seldom-used files (like the humongous iPhoto library); Iomega, for example, has a nifty 250-GB disk that’s about the size of a deck of cards, and it doesn’t even require a separate power adapter. But it does need a Firewire port, and Air doesn’t have one. Bummer.

In fact, even if it the Air did have a Firewire port, I was beginning to imagine a scenario where I’d have a whole separate bag of attachable “parts” that I would connect to the Air when needed: an external hard disk, an external CD/DVD optical disk, and an external USB-to-Ethernet adaptor, along with the micro-DVD adaptor, the remote-control card, and the spare batteries that turned out not to be available anyway. And I thought it was a little ironic that I’d be bragging to my friends about my nifty 3-pound laptop, while also dragging another three or four pounds of “spare parts” that I’d use from time to time. And the chances are that I would discover I left a critical one home, just when I needed it most …

Bottom line: if you’re a road warrior, or even a “normal” business traveler who might be away from his office for a few days at a time, you really want to have all of your “stuff” with you. Ideally, you’d like it to be built right into the laptop you’re lugging around. But if that’s not possible, then you need to have one laptop for “serious” away-from-the-office situations, and the Air, which you can throw into your briefcase, backpack, or purse, for those “quickie” one-hour trips to meet a client at lunch. But now you’ve got multiple machines, and you really do have to have a foolproof way of keeping them all synchronized; otherwise, you’ll find yourself dashing out of the office to show a client a great new Powerpoint presentation at lunch, only to discover that the Powerpoint presentation is still sitting on your “heavy-duty” laptop or desktop, back in the office … and the luncheon restaurant doesn’t have WiFi, so you don’t have any way to make a “remote” connection to the office computer to retrieve the file. Bummer.

Assuming that I could figure out a solution to the synchronization problem (which I’m not at all sure I really can do, at this point), I can imagine that it would be really great to have the lightweight Air machine, plus my heavy-duty, all-in-one, self-contained laptop. But realistically, I would probably end up using the Air machine only once or twice a week, during those one-hour lunch meetings when I really want to dazzle an easily-impressed client, and I really want to enjoy the benefit of a super-light three-pound machine. But $3,000 is a lot of money to spend for something you’re only going to use an hour a week; even the slower, low-tech version of Air (i.e., the one with the slower 1.6 GHz CPU and the slower, more energy-burning 80 GB rotating disk) is $1,800 (plus tax, plus shipping, plus plus plus). I’ve been able to rationalize and quasi-justify all kinds of computer purchases over the years, but that’s just too much.

What can we expect a year or two from now, if Steve Jobs shows us a second-generation Air? Maybe a faster CPU, and maybe more RAM; that would be nice. But if he found a way to quadruple the capacity of the hard disk, I would be seriously tempted. Figure out a way to add a PC card slot (or show me where to buy a GPRS high-speed modem that connects to the Air via USB), and add a Firewire port, and I’m sold.

In the meantime, I’ll be curious to see how many Air machines Apple manages to sell. I wish them all the success in the world — if only because that might help motivate them to do some more innovating, and give me my second-generation machine. But I can’t help wondering how many “serious” business computer users go through the same analysis that I did, with similar conclusions. And I can’t help wonder how many students and “casual” computer users will be willing to pay the steep price that Apple is charging for the Air technology — especially as the economy slides into a recession. I hope I turn out to be wrong, but I don’t think the MacBook Air doesn’t is going to be anywhere near as successful as the iPhone, let alone the iPod.

Let’s take another look a year from now, at the next MacWorld conference…