All his points are bogus. It's a freaking laptop, how many USB ports does he need? While I can come up with tons of use cases, I honestly don't recall an actual visual image in m head of a laptop with 2+ USB devices connected at the same time. And the only time I see someone sticking a CD/DVD into a laptop is to watch a movie, which doesn't stop me from thinking about replacing my CD/DVD tray with an extra bay battery (ThinkPads rock).

And Duo 2 1.6Gz is too weak? That's just insane. Software has stagnated for at least 10 years, lagging behind hardware like crazy. What is that guy running today that he wasn't running 10 years ago? I have a CPU scaling frequency indicator in Gnome menu that 99.9% of the time shows me freaking 800Mz - yes, that's a typical frequency my 2.2Gz Duo 2 is running at.

The only time I wish I had a faster PC is when I do batch conversion of a bunch of RAW files from my camera. But it's like doing backups - pushing gigabytes around... And even that I am doing on my "big" PC where I need more screen real estate.

The only thing this laptop is missing is UltraNav found on ThinkPads. An enormous productivity/ergonomics booster, something that will keep pe glued to Lenovo forever.

I think the blogger is just not in the market for a small laptop. I have a white Macbook that I'm very happy with, and I couldn't imagine carrying around anything larger. I'd have bought a 12" Powerbook if those had survived the Intel switch. In contrast:

> And lastly, let's be honest: did we really need things to get that much thinner? My MBP is a great size, not too heavy, and it's thin enough that there's quite a lot of leftover room in the laptop compartment of my bag.

There's obviously much more room for ports and other little conveniences at 15", but it's unfair to call a machine "useless" if it makes compromises to get smaller than that.

I regularly use 4 USB devices with my laptop. Keyboard, Mouse, Camera, iPod. Even if keyboard+mouse go together, and Camera and iPod are swappable, I still need at least 2 ports simultaneously. Maybe the keyboard won't be necessary, but I doubt it. I have yet to find a laptop keyboard I didn't hate.

I've had the exact same experience. When I read that the MacBook Air didn't have an optical drive, my first reaction was "WTF?", but then I counted how many times I've needed mine, and it turned out to be zero.

My reaction was: "fantastic news! No more irritating seek noises every damn time my macbook starts! No more tainted region coding infection! No more useless thing I never use anyway!"

Great news.

Been using a 12" laptop without an optical drive for about a year now. I only missed it when I wanted to finally install Linux about a month ago. I couldn't get it to work from a bootable USB drive so I ended up borrowing a friend's external CD drive. Glad to be rid of Windows, even if the fonts aren't very good. I'd kill for the equivalent of Windows standard font smoothing in Linux.