I still wouldn’t buy one with my own money. It’s just too specialized.
Tom and I ordered them for using at the conferences. We typically use our personal machines, which is great, but mine is a MBP, and his is some kind of 12 ton windoze thing, neither are light by any means.
So this way we can carry a little less weight for checking people in, looking things up, doing keynotes, etc.
The other upside, for me is travel. My wife and I are staying in Italy a week beyond 360|Flex Europe and blogging and surfing the web will be much nicer without a 3 or 4 lb MBP. I’ll be in Japan in May, again, a lighter machine will rock.
Plus, my MBP is my dev machine, it’s much more important and when I travel I sometimes worry about it, losing it or being damaged, would really impact my work.
So my thoughts…
it’s nice. it’s too small to work on all day, but as a second machine, it’s pretty nice. I won’t say how light it is, because I knew it was light, and those reviewers who repeat the obvious are kinda lame. Battery run time, easy to argue, weight, kinda hard, I figured Steve wasn’t fudging.
Combined with .mac I think it really comes into it’s own as a second machine. I moved all my conference stuff to .mac and created aliases in my regular docs folders. I have my iDisk available offline so the files are always there. So far it’s pretty smooth. I like it.
I definitely doesn’t feel powerful enough to do development, and the Hard drive (we opted for SSD) is WAY too small for that. My MBP has my code, CF and Flex, my iTunes library, my iPhoto library (not really that big), and gb’s and gb’s of other data, no way 64gb, or even 80, could handle it.
The battery seems ok, I’ve yet to run it down. The power adapter is pretty whack. It’s yet another brick to carry (should I take both machines) and it seems like the plug could easily have been a flat spot in the body to accommodate a standard mag safe plug, but this way consumers have to buy additional plugs, more $.
The fancy multi-touch trackpad…. haven’t used it. Firefox doesn’t recognize it (obviously) and I can’t fit my photos on it, and using it in the Finder, just makes my icons all the wrong size. So I’m not too bummed my MBP doesn’t have that feature.
It does boot fast, i’ll give it that.
My final verdict (for now at least) it’s a good second laptop for travel (we should all be so lucky to have that kind of coin) and presentations, it’s no way a primary developer laptop. It may very well work ok for someone who doesn’t compile code, or run photoshop often. We’re leasing these two, so we can have some write offs for 360Conferences, plus if they suck, we’ll buy them for the 1$ fee (cuz we’re paying so bloody much) and use them as conference terminals for whatever.
I tried it out on the MBA as soon as it arrived, seems to work well, you’ll want to be careful since now your facny EVDO modem is just laying out on the desk, or your knee or where ever.
So my AIR will now never be adrift without the intertubes, except in Europe where EVDO doesn’t exist :(
