MacBook Air: How Incomplete Is It?

Steve Jobs is, among many other things, the great denier. Second mouse buttons, floppy drives, 56-kbps modems--for decades, he has been perfectly willing to release products lacking one or more features that are standard equipment on everyone else's computers, if he thinks they're unnecessary or they offend his design principles or aesthetic sense.

Typically, the news that a new Mac is missing a feature is met by yelps of protest. But then, sooner or later, the rest of the industry follows Jobs's lead. (Okay, usually--I haven't seen any one-button mouses on PCs lately.) Jobs, in other words, tends to figure out that we can live without something before the rest of the world does.

I'm not sure if he has ever denied Apple customers as many features as he will with the MacBook Air, the superthin notebook that he unveiled at this morning's Macworld Expo keynote. In introducing the Air, Jobs said that manufacturers of other thin-and-light laptops made too many compromises to make their machines sleek, like using small keyboards and screens and wimpy CPUs. But nobody else in the industry would dream of making some of the compromises that the Air makes.

So what's missing? And how big a deal is it?

An optical drive
Mildly annoying omission
This is the one thing everybody assumed the Air would leave out, although I was holding out hope that Apple would take its cue from Toshiba's optical-drive-bearing featherweight Portege 500. There's a long history of subnotebooks skipping the optical drive to shave off weight and space, so the Air's doing so won't strike anyone as shocking. And Jobs is right in that a lot of things people do with optical drives--such as watch movies and install software--can be done these days without one. (Apple's new Remote Disc feature will help in the latter instance.)

Me, I mostly use my MacBook's Superdrive for two things: ripping CDs into MP3s and making data CDs and DVDs to distribute files to friends and colleagues. I guess I could do the former on another computer and then move the MP3s to an Air--sorry, Steve, I'm not ready to buy all my music from iTunes. And cheap thumb drives can probably do the trick when I want to hand out copies of files. Still, if I were to buy an Air, I suspect I'd spring for the $99 external Superdrive.

Ethernet
Seriously annoying omission
In the old days, no notebook had built-in ethernet; you had to futz with external adapters. Then it became standard equipment. The fact that the Air lacks it makes the machine a throwback.

Jobs spoke of the Air as a machine built to be used wirelessly. But most of the hotels I stay in assume that my computer has ethernet. It's also damn handy at work. I can't imagine there are that many people who can spring for a $1799 Air who won't need ethernet at least from time to time. Apple sells an external adapter, but if I traveled with an Air, I'd probably just toss my Airport Express travel router into my briefcase, giving me a form of ethernet compatibility that doesn't actually make me plug an ethernet cable into the Air.

Multiple USB ports
Mildly annoying omission
I'm not sure when I last owned a computer with only one USB port, but it's been a very, very long time. On the other hand, it's rare that I want to plug two USB devices into my MacBook at once, and at least one of the ones I use (a SanDisk MicroMate card reader) blocks access to both of the MacBooks ports when I use it anyhow. So I wouldn't not buy an Air because of its solo USB.