A couple months ago, I posted a long blog about the many reasons I had decided to forego the temptation to order Apple’s new MacBook Air. Too slow, too limited, missing ports and PC card slots, blah blah blah …

… and yet … and yet … I couldn’t help being tempted every time I saw one, every time I saw an advertisement, a billboard, a TV commercial. Maybe it’s the seductive power of Apple’s marketing, maybe it’s just a case of utterly irrational geek/gadget lust; but whatever the explanation, the reality is that I finally succumbed, about a week ago, and ordered one of the damn things. It showed up a few days ago, and it seems to be working fine. The big test is on Monday: I plan to take on my next business trip, which includes stops in Detroit, Bangalore, St. Petersburg, and Moscow. It may be a non-event, it may be a disaster, and it may be an entirely new and interesting experience. We’ll see …

My friends and colleagues are somewhat surprised and bemused by this sudden change, especially since I had been fairly consistent in my opinion that there was no rational justification for getting the skinny, sleek, lightweight, sexy, oh-so-cool machine. Interestingly, what changed my mind was a review by David Pogue in the New York Times, entitled “Can Blogger-Bashers Predict the Success of a Product? Unlikely.” What caught my eye was Pogue’s comment about trying to switch back to his existing Mac laptop, the five-pound MacBook (which is what I’ve been using as my primary computer. “After the Air,” Pogue said, “it felt like a piece of Soviet Army field equipment. When I tried to pick it up one-handed, I thought I’d break my wrist.”

For some reason, this really made an impact; I don’t know why, because I normally stuff my MacBook Pro into a backpack or briefcase, which I then sling over my shoulder. But I also carry a backup battery in the same case — indeed, not just one, but two backup batteries, just in case I should suddenly find myself on a 14-hour flight to Tokyo. And then there are the cables and adapters and assorted odds and ends, which probably results in a cumulative weight of something closer to ten pounds.

With the MacBook Air, there is no option of a spare battery: the existing battery is non-removable. I’m sure that will be a problem someday, but I have to admit that it’s been a couple of years since I’ve experienced the need to swap batteries. On my upcoming long flights from Detroit to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Bangalore, and Moscow to New York, I expect to connect my Air laptop to Lufthansa’s onboard AC power system; I may end up being disappointed, but at least for now, I’m willing to take the chance.

What’s most interesting, at least thus far, is that the Air computer has forced me to “clean house,” and just load/install the essentials; after all, I’ve only got a paltry 64 gigabytes of solid-state storage. That’s a big change from my traditional practice, when setting up a new laptop: I’ve normally taken advantage of a one-click option provided by Apple, which simply copies everything from one’s old computer to the new computer. All of the programs, all of the data — and also all of the preference files, all of the leftover temporary files, and all of the flotsam and jetsam of programs that I had installed, used briefly, and then deleted (but not “uninstalled”). Believe it or not, my MacBook Pro has over a million files on it; only a small percentage are really relevant for my day to day work.

I did order an external, USB-powered 250GB hard disk, and I also ordered the external “superdrive” that provides CD/DVD storage; that takes up some room in my briefcase, but it’s still much lighter than the 2 backup batteries that I used to lug around. And I’ve uploaded some secondary files to a0GB Internet-based storage facility that Apple provides with its .Mac service (for Apple fans, I’m talking about iDisk here). And most of my mail, which I now delete pretty quickly, is on the Internet so that I can access it from anywhere; and my 14,000-picture photo archives are all on Flickr now. So 64GB of storage may well prove to be more than enough; at the moment, I’ve got a little more than 30GB of free space.

As Pogue concluded in his recent review, “this [MacBook AIr] machine doesn’t make a great primary computer, thanks to its smallish hard drive.” But it may turn out to be the perfect traveling machine, especially in an age where mobility and portability are becoming more and more essential.

I’ll let you know how things turn out in the coming weeks …