So I couldn't resist and ordered myself a new MacBook Air (slower CPU and hard drive model). It showed up yesterday. So far, I'm fairly impressed. It's very thin and very light, which is to be expected. The keyboard seems to have a great feel and is normal size. The backlighting of the keys is nice. The ability to do special things with two fingers on the touchpad is very nice (two finger scroll/pan, pinch to zoom in, etc).
The screen is awesome. Great picture. I think I was hoping for a bit smaller overall size to the laptop to help keep from having to worry about it getting squished on the airplane by the person in front of you reclining back, but it is still good in that respect. I really like the built in webcam and ability to do a video chat (will come in very handy to say goodnight to the kids when I'm traveling).
Mac OSX is really getting the user interface down. The more I use it the more I really like it. Plus I really dig that when the GUI is making me mad I still have a command line interface that works as I expect it (since it's really Unix under here). Most things "just work." The ability to so easily "screen share" via iChat is a wonderful tool for getting or giving help on things over the 'net.
My complaints are minor, but there are a few. I would have been fine with a half pound heavier and probably a decent amount thicker to get a DVD drive. The external Superdrive works, but it's going to be a little annoying on planes.
The front edge is very sharp and annoying to rest your hands on. I have very big hands, though, so this might not bother most people.
Having the DVD drive be over USB appears annoy some applications like VisualHub. Handbrake works, but the CPU is so slow that it is pretty painful to rip a DVD. Fortunately I have other Macs around for that (and hopefully VisualHub gets upgraded to support Xgrid on 10.5.x and then I can rip DVDs using all my Macs at once!).
Pardon me while I go find a Michael Jordan "jumpman" sticker to put on my new Air.
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