A laptop for road warriors, who like a little style thrown in.

Apple's recent release of the MacBook Air laptop is further solidifying Apple's position as a continually innovative enterprise .  Reinventing the cell phone / MP3 player / PDA category with the ground breaking release last year of the iPhone, the MacBook Air rewrites the laptop "rules" by grabbing the "thinnest" category, at less than 3/4 inch, at it's thickest point.

Sure there are compromises.  It doesn't have a LAN port, CD drive slot or FireWire. (Why Apple would dump it's gloriously fast and flexible FireWire in favor of one USB 2.0? Traitorous.)  But it's built for mega-portability and speed, not computing power.  Oh, and like the iPhone, it's sexy.  The MacBook Air is designed like it stepped out of every tech geek's Barbarella fantasies.  Watch for it to make cameos on all the hot TV shows, or at least on the undersized cafe table of that annoying Bluetooth earpiece wearing tech geek, sucking up the WiFi and a venti mocha at the corner Starbucks, while he babbles incoherent syllables into the ether. That guy.  He may be annoying, but dang you covet his toys!

Think of the MacBook as Laptop-Lite, with Bluetooth, WiFi, video web cam with mic, and enough ports to get you by.  The ultimate Road Warrior's laptop.   When you pull this baby out in a sales meeting  (to take notes of course), just hand your clients a high-low tech pen (Lamy's Aluminum Fountain Pen $38), and they will be compelled to "sign on the line that is dotted."  And with the opening model at less than $1800, it's hard to resist.

Oh, and for you PC lovers out there. The MacBook Air can run PC programs natively (and easily) on it's Intel Chip.   You can use the built-in Bootcamp software, or do what I do and use Parallels or VMWare Fusion software. Yes, I'm writing this blog on my barely souped up little MacBook (white),  using VMWare Fusion to run a PC running MS-XP on a virtual drive. (A little more solid than glitchy Parallels, so far).  I've got two screens up, with MS-XP on one and Mac OSX on the other.  Welcome to our brave new world, where PC and Mac live together in peace and harmony (dogs and cats inter-marrying), and we get to reap the benefits of both worlds. But I digress into geekdom.

Is there a MacBook Air in my future? Frankly, I'm not on the road enough to warrent one...yet. I haven't even picked up an iPhone yet (waiting for more provider choices, or USA-Telecom to catch up with our high speed G3 brethern overseas).  But since that convergence will probably happen when pigs fly, I might have to pull the trigger sooner.

...but what if Apple combined an even smaller form factor based on the MacBook Air, with the touch screen and excellent web browser capabilities of the iPhone, in a tablet format. Kindle -killer anyone?

...or even eliminated the small tablet altogether and produced a flexible and foldable computing membrane with matching foldable screen, that I could stow in my back pocket.

...and that I could buy in a three-pack in any convenience store for less than 40 dollars, and activate with my iTunes account passcodes....

Ah, what a Brave New World we live in.

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