According to
Crave, the Macbook Air is "overpriced and underconfigured" just as the Cube back in 2000. If you remember, the Cube had no PCI slots, no additional drive bays, no standard audio jacks, and wouldn't accept full length graphics cards. Sound familiar?
The Air, on the other hand, no Ethernet port (why?), no optical drive, no removable battery, and requires a micro-DVI connector for output to a monitor. With these comparisons it seems Apple is taking the same route with the Air as it did with the Cube. Both offer underwhelming specs as the Cube's hard drive was incredibly slow, while the Air's 80GB drive is half the capacity of the largest iPod classic. The price tag of the air is just as ridiculous as it'll cost about $1,799 to purchase. Though the Cube was a commercial, does the Air have the appeal to customers to prevent what the Cube went through?
The more thought I put into analyzing the Air the more I wonder who will actually purchase the notebook. The newer MacBooks will probably offer the same size screen as the Air, a much more powerful processor, more hard drive space, probably the same amount of RAM at 2GB, and most likely will cost less. The only tradeoff is 2 pounds in weight, but does that really matter when it comes to performance?
