For the non Geek crowd like my wife or sister, they value style more than functionality. You need to see how the non-ZDNet reading crowd really uses a laptop PC at home:
- Battery: I've never seen anyone carry spare battery packs for laptops. So the people that do are a real minority.
- Ports: The only ports I see people like my wife & sister use are to plug in a digital camera or MP3 player from time to time or for an external mouse. So one or two USB ports are enough.
- No CD/DVD drive: This medium is still being used but is quickly being replaced by digital downloads, so in a year from now I don't see many people using it anymore in a laptop either. So an external drive makes a lot of sense.
- No Ethernet: These non-geeks like to sit on a couch with the PC or take it with them and never plug it into ethernet. Hotels with ethernet only are in the real minority.
- 80 GB HDD: this is my only concern, since photos and videos will quickly fill that up, but I expect that to be rectified soon by Apple as HDD technology catches up. In any case it would be advisable to buy an inexpensive external 500 GB HDD for backup and offloading anyway.
So the MacBook Air really is targeted at the majority since the majority of users are not geeks.
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