This is the first MacWorld Keynote that I have actually ever noticed or cared about. Like most other Mac-Lovers, I had all kinds of streams and RSS feeds programmed into my iPhone in order to get the high points of new Apple products as soon as the words dribbled from Steve's mouth. And like most Mac-Lovers, I was most anxious to hear about the new ultra-portable coming from Apple. And I anticipate that I am going to get a lot of questions from family and friends as to whether or not I am buying one at launch.

While I am passionate about computer technology, I am probably most passionate about mobile gear. Any long time readers of the site know that I continue to struggle to find the perfect mobile computing platform to completely replace the ubiquitous notepad. I was hoping that the MacBook Air might be it. But it's not. The disappointment caused me to take stock of my current mobile outfitting across the board and determine why the Air misses the mark for me, and potentially with other mainstream consumers.

My COMPAL IFL-90 is my gaming laptop. It has a great screen, and I love the flat black color scheme. The nVidia GeForce Go 8600M GT at 512MB is plenty fast enough for me to play BioShock at the highest settings. The only drawback is that it runs Vista, and I have had numerous compatibility issues. It (like my last three gaming laptops) also has a suspend glitch where it does not always properly go to sleep. Despite those flaws, the MacBook Air could in no way replace my gaming laptop, due to being equipped with the integrated Intel X3100 graphics processor and running OS X. Regardless of the new campaigns to launch gaming on the Mac, if you want to game these days, you still have to do it in Windows to access the latest titles, and an integrated GPU just does not cut it in speed. Further, with the masses of files that I juggle these days, the MacBook Air's max hard drive size of 80GB really makes the Air too small to use Boot Camp and install an XP partition in order to play games. No; no matter how I cut it, the MacBook Air would not crowd out the IFL-90, or even infringe on its territory in any way.

The one corner that the Air could have imposed upon is the one occupied by my MacBook. But when I compare it to the MacBook, it comes up wanting. The Air has a slower processor, and a smaller hard drive. It does have a higher max memory capacity, and it is roughly 2 pounds lighter. It does not have an integrated optical drive. While you can purchase an external Superdrive which will work great at home and/or seated at a desk, it does not help a lot on the airplane, at least not practically and comfortably. Where the Air really fails to hit a target is in its footprint. With a screen as large as the MacBook, the Air has the same footprint that my MacBook does. While my opinions may not be typical across the technorati, I do not care as much about weight as I do footprint. I'm a big guy; if I want to carry a heavy laptop I can, and it doesn't really make that much of a difference. The weight difference between the Air and the MacBook is only about 2 to 2.5 pounds. I do care about footprint, which drives how much stuff you can pack in a bag. I do not care about weight, or thickness. I do care about how much surface area a device occupies and how much it prevents you from carrying something else.

I will not go into a lot of detail on the merits of my LINUX Gateway laptop. In short, because the only reason I continue to use the Gateway is because it gives me a spare location to experiment with LINUX. It is not really feasible to replace it, unless someone is offering me one for free, so there is no real competition here between it and the MacBook Air. Again, due to the 80GB available in the Air's hard drive, it is unlikely I would dual boot the Air with OS X and Ubuntu.

That leaves the lane occupied by my Samsung Q1 Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC). The Air has a full keyboard. I have a USB keyboard accessory for the Q1, but, much like the optical drive on the Air, it is a pain to get an external USB device situated on an aircraft. It actually makes the Q1 have a footprint as large if not larger than an ultra-portable laptop. The Q1 only has about 2h30m to 2h40m of battery life. The Air will supposedly have about 5. The Q1 has a pen-based (which can actually be used as a touch-based) interface and can be held between two hands like a notebook; perfect for surfing the web and reading eBooks. The main reason the Q1 has not become more of a steady computing companion is because it takes so long to boot. I don't mind the sluggish performance once it's up; I mean, heck, it is an ultra-mobile PC, I never asked for it to be as fast as my desktop. But the boot process is what really drives me nuts. OS X is ready within a few seconds.

While the Air could make some inroads into the Q1's current territory, at the end of the day, the fact that it would have to sit in my lap, that it wouldn't really be any more positionable on an airplane, and that it does not have a true touch based interface (although you can mimic some of the iPhone and iPod Touch functionality via the touch-pad) means it doesn't displace the Q1 either, and therefore does not really fit anywhere in my currently available equipment kits. Add to that the price-point above a MacBook, and I can only give it the hairy eyeball.

If I did not already have a MacBook, or if the Air had a smaller footprint (a 10.4" screen would have been good, but even a 12" screen would have created more product differentiation between it and the MacBook), I might have some desire to add it to the collection. But not today.

So the next question I am sure my readership will ask me is if the MacBook Air is not a good fit for me, is it a good fit for them? I would suggest that this product will be a good fit for people who meet one or more of the following parameters:

1. frequent flyers and road warriors who do not already have a Mac laptop of some type

2. college students in creative curricula who do not already have a Mac laptop of some type

3. those who have an iPhone or new iPod that would integrate nicely with a Mac OS X platform

4. those on a non-Intel Mac Platform who are looking to upgrade

Apple is confronted perhaps more than other consumer electronics companies by the concern of their hot new products cannibalizing sales of another hot runner, and therefore exert much more effort in the strategic considerations of their product price-points. While I personally question the $1800 price point of the MacBook Air as a consumer, as a matter of business analysis, I see the point in positioning it smack dab in the middle between the MacBook and the MacBook Pro. The question over the next few months will be if people see the point in making the jump from the MacBook price-point to get into a platform that does not offer that much more portability (the MacBook Air has roughly the same footprint as the MacBook, but is thinner, but only weighs 2.5 lbs less than a MacBook), but is significantly slower (if you don't spring for the 4GB of memory and the solid-state hard-drive, which would recover somewhat from the drop in processor speed in terms of user experience). It will be a interesting question to see the answer to.

"A computer is like a union; it never works unless you spend money on it."