MacBook Air

Apple has, in recent years, become a company whose business model is Introducing the Next Big Thing. The iPod fulfilled that mission beautifully. The Mac Mini, not so much.

I think the MacBook Air will be more like the latter than the former.

It is certainly thin and light. I would never carry my laptop in a manilla envelope even if I could, but if that's your thing, go for it.

But as a computer, the MacBook Air just does not seem very impressive.

It has an 80 gigabyte hard drive. The smaller iPod Classic has an 80 gigabyte hard drive. The larger iPod Classic has a 160 gigabyte hard drive. They couldn't even give it as much storage as the larger iPod?

It has 2 gigabytes of memory, which is not expandable. That's barely industry-standard now, to say nothing of next year.

To me, the MacBook Air looks like a small iPod with a full-sized keyboard. I don't think this is the Next Big Thing that everybody has been waiting for.

Now, an iPod with a built-in XM receiver... that's what I'm talking about!