I've been thinking about an ideal working setup. Lots of people fantasize about these things.

I used to have two 24" monitors with a pansy dell laptop to power them.

Now I have just a 17" MacBookPro. It's excellent, but I could use more pixels.

The ideal setup would be a MacPro with 2 30" screens, with something like MacBook Air setup to mirror my configuration.

It would be docked like my iPhone, auto-install software that I install on the desktop, auto-configure to match the relevant system settings, auto-update the local repository that I'm developing, etc.

Any time, when you need portability, you could take the Air.

I'm sure a simple script could get most of this done on a local wireless network. Too bad I don't have $13K to spend on it ... yet.

To be technically correct, the ideal monitor setup is N M" screens, where N is 1 greater than your current number, each currently (M-2)"

I believe that ideal monitor count goes up in a Fibbonaci sequence. e.g. When I had two monitors, I wanted three - now that I have three, I reckon five would be brilliant.

This would get my +10 upvote of the day

This is where .Mac's BackToMyMac really shines: http://www.apple.com/dotmac/backtomymac.html

They should have pushed this as well in the keynote. I'll have a MacPro/iMac, or even a MacBook Pro, on my desk and when I need to go to catch a flight, show a keynote presentation, or do some typing somewhere, I'll just grab the Air and walk away. Come back and everything's resynced and backed up on my Time Capsule.

My current system involves juggling my desktop, my dell laptop, and my macbooks, along with like 15 different drives.

That is nice, but it should push to the ultra-mobile, not pull from the desktop. Configuration and code versioning is something that should be automated, and a pull through miscellaneous wireless networks while mobile is a bad way to go.

I see one major downside to this machine: it has memory soldered to the motherboard. In my experience, memory is a fairly high-failure item, and I've seen more than one laptop bricked by onboard memory failing. It's potentially worse with a very thin machine since the memory is less protected.

If you're planning to keep one of these beyond the warranty period, know somebody with SMT soldering equipment.

Not to mention the "Integrated Battery." If the batteries are as failure prone as normal batteries, this would worry me. And what about traveling? Is TSA going to take me to a windowless room for not removing my laptop battery? Also, they project a lifetime of 18 months. Kind of low for the price point.

Seems less a practical upgrade and more of a pretty rich kid's toy. Especially when my choices for a hard drive are a $1000 64 GB drive (yeah, yeah SSD. Not worth 1K to me) or an incredibly slow 4200 80 GB drive. Ugh.

The integrated battery is a real flaw. 2 years is usually max (if you're lucky) on batteries. What to do then? Hmmm.

Disassemble and replace the cells, of course! This is hacker news, not shiny consumer product review.

Have apple install a new battery for $129 all-in.

I don't know, but what's the big hoopla about it? It is very thin, and light, but at $1,800 you are paying very dearly for a machine like that it is not that powerful.

The power of it is being able to easily take it wherever you want. Right now I have a very powerful Dell Inpiron 9400, and it is heavy. I only take it on major trips. With the Mac Air, I can easily take it with me whenever I need it without a second thought. Also, I want to use if for remote coding, and with sbcl/emacs/slime, it is plenty powerful.

Killer feature: extreme portablility with very good power.

And.. It is simply beautiful. It looks like a dream from a futuristic scifi movie. In fact, this may be the most beautiful computer to date - but I have to see it in person to confirm. (I still remember going crazy over the Next computer when it came out)

Yes, it's portable, but I'm kinda curious about how it would be to work with it over long periods of time. Considering how thin it is, I would think that there would be a pretty serious learning curve when it comes to typing. If, in fact, the keyboard is implemented so that you don't feel like you're typing on the tabletop, this will probably be a winner due to the weight savings. I could care less if they make it any smaller, if the regular MacBook only weighed a couple pounds, I would probably own one right now.

I would this would be a benefit, having a keyboard so thin it feels like typing on the tabletop. Wouldn't that lessen the risk of RSI?

Yes, I have that dell too, and it is powerful and heavy. But, for 1800, you can buy that, and the Asus Eee PC, so you can have them both, one very powerful machine, and one very portable one, for even cheaper than the Mac air.

The Eee is ugly, slow, and gimpped, so I wouldn't consider that a very good option. Unless all you do is surf the web and check email (and absolutely nothing else).

I looked at the Eee, and the keyboard is undersized as is the screen. I'm not sure if you could really be fully productive with it.

It's simple and thin like the iPod. If price wasn't an option and I could have more than one laptop I'd certainly want one. I can fit my iPod Nano in my wallet. The Air looks like it could fit in a folder.

Weight is more important for me, though. I don't honestly need anything extremely thin.

I bet with the optional solid state drive, it will seem very, very fast compared to the other Macbooks.

It will also seem very, very expensive.

The funny thing is that this would be the least expensive laptop I've ever bought to date. My first laptop cost $5000, as did the following 3. My very powerful dell was around $3000.

I see now that it is $3100 for the laptop including the 64GB flash memory - not an additional $3100 as the original article said. So it's not as expensive as I thought.

I have to agree with you... Apple, I feel, did not take the "this is the next step in mobile computing and we're leading the way" approach here. It's just a thin, albeit gorgeous, computer.

I'm not saying I don't want one, of course.

I think the best part is the mouse gestures. It doesn't actually add any functionality that you didn't have before but it makes the whole experience more organic and you forget you're using a computer. That's what apple does right.

This machine is a big step b/c it's shedding unnecessary historical devices like the optical drive. It's leaping into a world where there is always a connection between machines and to the internet. All the while they are meeting and sometimes surpassing old functionality with software that makes networking a lot easier (bonjour, time-capsule etc.) While slashdot is lamenting the lack of "options" apple is striving toward a machine with no ports and no keyboard. They want as little friction as possible between you and your experience. The macbook air is just a temporary stop-off on this trajectory.

Apple is sometimes a bit premature about dropping legacy tech. They eliminated the floppy drive from all their models before USB flash drives were common, for example. The lack of an optical drive is appropriate for a subnotebook, but I've found myself needing wired ethernet quite a bit during the past year.

Of course, there are USB ethernet adapters, but that takes up the only USB port. There are USB hubs, but at that point there's enough random crap to carry around to negate much of the compactness of this machine.

Thus comes a complementary product, the Airport Express. Normally just a wireless router with an AirTunes doodad, it could be remarketed in this case as the Air's "wireless-to-Ethernet adapter."

Do they have some new gigabit wireless protocol I didn't know about? If not, it will take about 20 times as long to transfer a large amount of data.

Not quite gigabit. I think I read somewhere that http://www.apple.com/wifi/80211/ can hit around 160 megabits, though.

Now that is a sweet looking machine.

I just checked SBCL (Lisp), and they support Mac OS X :)

Agreed. But I wish they would stop mentioning how thick it is at the edge.

Perfection is difficult :)