I'd say that the lack of a built-in optical drive is a bigger problem than a dearth of ports or a non-removable battery.

I so rarely use the optical drive in my notebook that it wouldn't be my primary complaint with the Air. Of course the first time i'd really need to use it (badly) I'd probably be swearing up and down.

But that's what the external drive is for. When I do need to use a disc, 90+% of the time it's when I'm at home with the machine on a desk.

Just some perspective since I'm not the slightest bit interested in the Air.

I'm in the same boat of not really caring about the optical drive in the laptop. For the past few times I've traveled by air, I've ripped movies to my PSP to watch, so the concept of doing this for a laptop isn't really foreign to me. I'm also not too terribly bothered by the battery, as the only time I have swapped them in my 7 years of laptop owning is when I'm replacing one with a newer one due to age. Since the battery costs the same as a removable one, and includes labor, they seem to have that base covered.

I do wonder how you reload the OS on it if you don't buy the $99 external drive. Did they implement remote disc all the way in the EFI firmware as well, akin to the remote CD rom functions in most decent servers? And while Parallels or VMWare on the machine would more then likely satisfy peoples Windows needs, can it run Boot Camp?

I'll admit I'm a bit tempted by it if I go down the path of getting a Mac desktop in the near future. My MacBook Pro will lose most of it's daily use of being my main system, and going to a lighter package would then be tempting. I'd still keep the ambient light sensor and backlit keyboard, and aluminum casing that I've now had on my laptops for 5 years.

The downside is that the speed is a step down from even my 2 year old MacBook Pro. So I'd be side stepping instead of upgrading, though with a desktop this would be less of a concern. If the Air doesn't suffer the fate of the Cube, it's probably in my future, but at least a year or two out.

Not only that, but ripping the movies ahead of time saves battery life when you're traveling (as opposed to playing them directly off the DVD drive).

By the way...

Follow up regarding the initial post in this thread...

This thing is major orders of awesome and is made entirely of win after it's been hacked. Shell prompt? Check. SSH/SFTP? Check. NES Emulator? Check. ScummVM? Check. E-book reader? Check. IM client? Check.

I also didn't realize how easy it is to completely reverse the hacks and return the thing back to out-of-box state. I can roll this thing back to Factory 1.1.1 or 1.1.2 whenever I feel like it. So when the time comes that apple does release the SDK, I haven't locked myself out of that route.

On the lack of an optical disk drive: I do a lot of business travel and I've never had an optical disk drive. Ever. It's very rarely an issue. Example: if somebody wants to hand you files without emailing them, they use a USB thumbdrive. I think I once had a case where we had a CD that we needed to read and share; one guy with a CDROM read it and then we passed the contents around on a thumbdrive.

On catastrophic failure and the need to reinstall: I figure, if all else fails and I'm in a foreign city, I can always find a nearby Apple store. They'll have everything. (Hopefully.) I am quite curious how you can boot or do disaster recovery over the net. I'm also curious what you're supposed to do if the hard drive fails, since it doesn't appear to be user accessible. Sounds like another reason that you should only buy an Air with the SSD disk.

Following up from a thread last June, it's topical to discuss ZFS again. For those of you who've missed it, ZFS is now semi-officially supported on OS X. A variety of useful features don't yet work, such as booting from ZFS, direct access to snapshots, and there are still bugs (iTunes isn't happy, and neither is Spotlight). Nonetheless, this is a big step ahead. I wouldn't bet the integrity of my data on it. Yet.

Which leads to an intriguing question. My old Infrant file server is too slow and is full. Time for something new. I need to get this running in the next few weeks. I'm currently thinking I'll go the clone route. Based on our discussion in October, I'm leaning toward going barebones and getting the Norco DS-520. However, it's going into a sizable closet where noise is less of an issue than in my previous house. This leads me to wonder whether I should just go for a generic beige-box PC. Ultimately, I'll install OpenSolaris, thus maximizing the chances of ZFS "just working." I figure that one benefit of the Norco box over other "server" boxes is that it's sufficiently generic that just about anything should run on it, and that it has a VGA jack, so I can at least see what's going on when I'm trying to install it. Or, should I just go with a beige-box PC?

It's Here!

Now I'm starting to get interested...