Pictured: Macintosh Portable, PowerBook G4, MacBook Air)

When it comes to the Macbook Air, some people hate it, some people love it, and most people have no idea what they’re talking about.

The Air is a normal person’s computer. It’s not for your 300GB collection of movies you got off bittorrent. It’s not for “road warriors” who for some reason have jobs that force them to recalculate giant spreadsheets, edit digital video, recompile Firefox, and play Windows Solitaire all at the same time for 4.9 hours of a 5 hour flight.

I prefer to relax with a book and some cheap airline scotch while riding in a pressurized tube at 30,000 feet. I also prefer the Air to my old PowerBook.

The 80GB Air has a 1.6Ghz Core 2 Duo. It’s the slowest Macintosh you can buy. It’s also really fast. I bought it for working on my Rails apps at home. I can work for a little over 3 hours at a time before recharging. Of course, when am I never in range of an outlet? I don’t like to work at the beach.

If you want to do all of those weird things, Apple just happens to have a complete lineup of laptops with replaceable batteries, huge amounts of storage, and optical drives. Just buy one of those instead.

So anyway, the Air is a great machine. I love the keyboard, the screen is really, really bright, the battery lasts long enough for me, and I haven’t missed the optical drive. I used the drive sharing once to install the OSX developer tools. Remember when the iMac lost its floppy drive? It’s the same deal. It’s even easier to copy stuff over the network these days.

Did you notice that the Air is really, really thin? You don’t notice how nice it is until you carry one around. I’m using it with my PowerBook bag, and I can fit a lot more in there now! While thin, the Air is not too small to have a tiny keyboard and screen. It’s just about the perfect size.

This is what I think of some of the problems people have with the Air:

• It only has one USB port! What are you really carrying around that you need all of those USB ports for? If you’re carrying five USB devices, you can carry a hub. Seriously, what are you plugging into this thing?
• It’s too big/too small! No, it’s not.
• You can’t swap batteries! Yeah, because I’ve ever owned more than one battery for all of the laptops I’ve ever had.
• The drive is too small! It’s not big, but I’m not using it as an iPod. My apps aren’t huge either. They’ll come up with bigger, tiny drives. Just wait a bit.
• It’s too expensive! Buy a $600 Dell. It has more USB ports anyway.
• No optical drive! No, I can’t install Office while on a plane. I really never use the optical drive on my PowerBook. I watched a DVD once, I guess.
• No ethernet jack! Stay at a better hotel.

So, there are my rambling thoughts on the Air.