Oops, Net Concensus Wrong Again

The MacBook Air is topping the Apple Store's charts. (My wife is dead set on replacing her MacBook Pro with one.) How could we all have been so wrong? (Hey, I said it was going to appeal to the kind of people who buy Louis Vuitton handbags, but it seems to be doing better than that. Maybe I should have said Coach handbags...)

Well, the Air makes the right compromises. In the end, when you use a notebook you're guaranteed to use the display and keyboard and the Air makes no compromises on these, and does well on the third. Meanwhile, various (generally more expensive) PC competitors offer lots of ports, optical drives, removable batteries ... but compromise on the screen and keyboard. Yes, you MAY want a firewire port, or an ethernet port, or a DVD drive, but you WILL want a good keyboard and screen.

Personally, if I were to buy one, I'd get the ethernet dongle and the external drive, but I'd probably only use the dongle for bulk file transfers and hotels which don't have wireless, while the latter would live in a drawer (except for installing OS upgrades).