This week brought the much anticipated MacBook Air into the Dotto Tech studios for our first look at the somewhat controversial new notebook from Apple. Once again Apple is leading the way in innovation with a new class of notebook.

It is not really a subnotebook and it is definitely not a full sized notebook. The MacBook Air is ultra light - only 3 lbs - but it still has a large 13” screen and a full sized keyboard. Thin is in, and as the TV commercials pay testament to, the Air will slide nicely into a manila envelope. 

As they did with the first iMacs, Apple has eschewed removable storage on the Air. There is no optical drive - the Air is designed to be fully self-contained - and in fact there is only a single USB port and a headphone jack, plus a mini DVI video output to allow peripheral connections.

The Air is not designed for the average Mac user; with no media drive and limited ports it is not the “all things to all people” that the MacBooks have traditionally been. You won’t watch your favourite movie on the Air, or edit a movie. It is instead, I think, designed for those who want real mobility and instant productivity. The Air is available with a traditional hard drive or a Solid State Drive (SSD). The model we received for the show has the SSD. It was my first experience using one, and my goodness, what an experience it is. Solid State Drives store your data, applications, files and operating system in solid memory, as opposed to traditional drives that store your data on a spinning magnetic disc. This means the MacBook Air is always ready for action; just open the computer and work, with no waits, and no transferring data back and forth from an increasingly fragmented and slow hard drive. The MacBook Air is the newest member of the “instant-on” culture. Saving files takes no time; I moved a large number of music files onto the Air to test it out. I used a USB memory key; it took about 20 minutes for the file to write onto the key, and about 2 minutes for the Air to suck the memory key dry! One can quickly get used to that kind of speed.

For most people the light weight and style of the Air will be the main appeal; for me though, it is SSD all the way.

There will be a lot of criticism focused on Apple for the limited connectivity built into the Air. Apple believes the Air is a creature of the Internet; everything it needs is found online, and with Wifi and Bluetooth built-in, the Air should be able to connect to everything one needs. Time will tell on that mark. I personally have lived for the past year with no built in drive on one of my main notebooks - a Tablet PC - and I can testify that it is no real hardship.

The Air will find a lot of competition in this new space; Lenovo has already announced the 3lb, X300 with SSD, and it is available with a built-in optical drive as an option. Despite the competition, I suspect all future notebooks in this category will be compared to the Air, and not the Air to them; Apple, once again, leads the way.