Also this weekend, TheBoyfriend™ picked up the game Age of Empires III which is way more my kind of game than his, but that pretty much means that he got it so I would play it WITH him (and kick his ass at it, just sayin’). Of course, he got the PC version, and the Mac version was no where to be found. Not a big deal though since Leopard comes packaged with Boot Camp. I don’t actually have a Boot Camp partition set up. I run VMFusion for what little bit I need to jump into a Windows environment, and while not powerful enough for gaming, it has served my purposes well enough, PLUS if I set up a Boot Camp partition, I can share that installation of Windows between VMF and BC, so I can use it both on top of and separate from my OSX installation depending on what I’m needing it for.

I’m fairly proficient with computers and I’ve installed Windows on PCs more times than I can count, but I did something terribly, terribly, terribly wrong while trying to set up Boot Camp. I’m not sure how, but when I was done, not only had I erased my entire hard drive, but I’d completely wiped out all formatted partitions leaving me with nothing but useless space! Did I mention I had a couple hundred dollars worth of completed but not yet submitted freelance work on the hard drive I’d just erased? It was time to see if Time Machine lived up to it’s hype. I inserted the Leopard disc and partitioned and formatted my hard drive back to the way it originally was. Then, sure enough, it was as simple as clicking “Restore from backup,” selecting my Time Machine drive, and the date I wanted to restore to, and then heading off to watch TV for a couple of hours. Upon coming back, the Mac said it was ready for a reboot so I did, and from that point forward it was as if nothing had happened. I am a Time Machine believer!

It’s not that the I don’t like the idea of a laptop that is only 3/4 of an inch thick at it’s thickest point (though I admit I have some questions as to the durability of such a machine), but with a $1799 price tag, this isn’t something many people are going to be able to buy for the “cool factor” alone. I suspect anyone paying that price will be using it as their primary computer and, for that purpose, the MacBook Air just doesn’t stack up.For one thing, the hard drive is a wimpy 80gb. That might be ok for Joe Schmo who doesn’t do anything but check his email and surf the web, but then if that’s all you do with your computer, why are you buying a $1799 laptop? And if you don’t mind the smaller hard drive, why not go with the baseline MacBook. That’ll land you a faster processor and even if you add an extra stick of RAM to match the Air’s 2gb, you’ll still be saving yourself $500. I find it difficult to believe that there is a significant market out there of people wealthy enough to drop an extra $500 bucks to shave a quarter-inch thickness (and .4 GHz of processor speed!!!) off of their laptop.

Then there’s the lack of a CD/DVD drive. Kudos to Apple for looking to the future, but… …I’m not sure that future is here yet. Sure, you can download alot of your movies, music and software from the web now, but what about when you want to give a 500MB file to a friend (or a client)? Without the ability to burn to a disc, I guess you’re left purchasing webspace (a .Mac account perhaps) to upload to, so your friend can download from. And what if you want to watch your home movies on your home tv? I suppose you may be able to wirelessly transmit them there if you own an AppleTV, but that won’t help Grandma three states away see them. Not to mention that if you’re storing your films on your hard drive, that 80 gig ain’t gonna go far.

Now, you could BUY an external drive to burn your discs with (in fact Apple would be happy to sell you one specifically intended for the MacBook Air), but my question is where do you plug it in? The MacBook Air contains a single USB port. Plug a (wired) mouse into it and you’ve lost that.

I’m not saying I don’t think the MacBook Air is “cool.” I just don’t think it would fit the bill as my primary computer. I’d love to have one as a cool toy (err… a secondary computer), but I think at $1799, it’s priced out of the toy range.