Originally Posted by
tjspiel
I'll give it a good six months before I buy one to see what issues come up. I'm more worried about flex than the shocks and vibrations it would be subject to on my commute. I've had a powerbook almost completely apart and the only component that I found to be protected from shocks is the hard drive. It's mounted using rubber grommets. The Macbook Air has an option for a solid state drive which would help in the durability department but it's small and expensive.
Mobile phones and iPods are pretty thin and probably subjected to more abuse than a typical notebook so while it's something to consider it may turn out to be just a durable as a Macbook Pro.
Given it's thinness, I'm guessing there will soon be a hard, protective sleeve to put it in to protect it from flexing. But that will take away some, but probably not most, of the weight savings. The hard drive is, I think, pretty much the same as what's in my iPod, which I seldom bike without, and it's holding up fine, and it, unlike the laptop, has the hard drive spinning while in motion. That said, hard drive failure is one the primary ways to kill an iPod, and there's plenty that recommend not biking or running with a hard drive-based model, but then I think the point is largely moot if the hard drive isn't operational while you're traveling.
It does look sweet, but with the storage available, I don't see how it could be anything other than a secondary computer, and I might hesitate to buy a secondary computer for that price.
There's always the
Asus EEE. Small, light, flash-based, and
it can run OS X, although maybe not well. I wouldn't put it on par with the MacBook Air, but for the price, I'd be much less likely to complain about the features it was missing.