Is the MacBook Air worthy of its hefty price tag?

January 15th was a particularly exciting day for a lot of people out there who try and stay on the cusp of new technology. Of course, for far more people it was simply a Tuesday -which is a bit less exciting - but the events of the day will still be impacting everyone’s lives in a similar way.

The reason for the excitement was the annual Apple Macintosh trade show, “MacWorld”, which was held in San Francisco for this 2008 conference. Apple’s CEO, the unpredictable Steve Jobs, generally holds a much celebrated keynote presentation which outlines the latest business and financial news from Apple as well as introducing a host of new products which are usually kept under a veil of secrecy until that point.

Such products unveiled at MacWorld but previously unknown to consumers worldwide range from the iMac, to iTunes, to the iPhone. Many more products than this have first seen the light of day at a MacWorld conference, but suffice to say that some of these products have already begun to change how we work and live as a society.

The MacBook Air was one such product- completely unknown until January 15th, when it was introduced at the MacWorld Expo. Since it is such a new product, I’ll give a basic explanation of its concept and features. Notebook computers are prevalent in today’s society - packing in most of the computing power of a larger desktop system, but in a much smaller and more portable package – but for a lot of people they are still too bulky to really be considered “portable”. The MacBook Air holds onto many of the good features from other laptops, such as a high-quality widescreen display and a full-sized keyboard, but ditches the thickness of the case (the new thickness is an unprecedented 0.16 inches to 0.76 inches), the usual weight of a modern laptop (now only 3.0 lbs), and all while maintaining a superb battery life unheard of from its ultra-portable competitors (an amazing 5 hours of unplugged use).

But nothing is without negatives- and so what tradeoffs had to be made here? Well, the new casing for the MacBook Air is nothing short of incredible, but in order to maintain the weight and thickness Apple has had to remove many features that are usually standard on any laptop. First, the optical DVD drive was removed (though an external USB drive can be purchased for $99). Second, there is no ethernet port- only wireless networking is available without an adapter. Third, Apple has stripped the usual ports available down to 3: 1 USB, 1 Video, and 1 Audio out (For me, the lack of Firewire and/or an Audio in port was the deal breaker). In addition to removing these components, Apple also had to shrink the size of the hard drive (a modest 80 GB), compromise on the speed of the processor (1.6 or 1.8 GHz), and leave users unable to upgrade the included memory (2 GB) or graphics card (Intel).

In short, no.. the Mac Book Air is not worth its price tag (starting at $1799) if you’re looking for a computer with some oomph and expandability to it. But if you don’t need your computer to be the fastest on the block, and are looking for something that won’t make your arm tired lugging it around this may be the perfect choice. And for those of you who always buy the newest and shiniest toys, put the MacBook Air on your list.. expect to see this marvel of design featured in movies and TV shows for a long time to come. For the rest of us, this is still a Good Thing- The MacBook Air is the world’s thinnest notebook computer, and the technologies developed to bring it to market are getting more inexpensive every day that passes.