MacBook Air hands on #1, originally uploaded by Dan_H.

The new MacBook Air, announced at the 2008 MacWorld keynote last Tuesday the fifteenth, is, in short, pretty awesome (and really pretty).

I’ll now go over a few things I deem more important and relevant (especially with respect to my white MacBook) than other things about this. I’m not going to talk in detail about the illuminated keyboard, for example, because even though it’s really cool (and I’ve always wanted a keyboard like that), it doesn’t “make or break” the Air. If you want to know more, though, I recommend and encourage you to check out John Gruber’s fairly thorough and decent review.

So without further ado, here are its dimensions:

• Height: 0.16-0.76 inch (0.4-1.94 cm)
• Width: 12.8 inches (32.5 cm)
• Depth: 8.94 inches (22.7 cm)
• Weight: 3.0 pounds (1.36 kg)

This is already pretty impressive. My white MacBook weighs five pounds, so a decrease to only three is actually really good. Mine is also one inch thick (”thin”), but the new Air is only .76 inch at its thinnest.

As for the screen, it’s 13.3″ widescreen just like all white or black MacBooks. I find this is a really good size for a portable. It’s enough to handle everything you need (especially with Exposé), and it’s not oversized by any means.

With the design of the Air, Apple decided to save some space with some fairly wise decisions. There is no DVD or CD drive, and there is only one USB port. (There is also no Firewire port, but I’ve never had to use the one on my MacBook.) As an alternative to a built-in DVD drive, Apple now offers a slim USB SuperDrive (DVD writer) as well as an easy way to map a DVD drive on another computer (an iMac, for example) as a bootable network drive. The latter of the two, however, is not really a viable option for watching DVDs, since wireless now is not that fast. I would opt for carrying around a USB SuperDrive. It’s not that big, and it’s not like I actually use my MacBook’s DVD drive most of the time anyway. In any case, I find that, overall, the space-saving design here is great.

The MacBook Air is cool, no doubt.

The real question lies, for me, with whether or not I want to deal with a little extra hassle—limited ports and a loose SuperDrive to carry around when I think I might need it (which, I admit, is not very much of the time). For now, I think I find my white 2.0 GHz Core Duo MacBook sufficient and practical. The built-in ports and DVD drive are almost always fine; I never really have to worry in any way about them. Sure, the standard MacBook is not as light and thin as the new Air, but it’s already pretty thin (one inch!) and not heavy at all. So, for now, I think I’ll stick with the MacBook where I’ve already put my money. In the future though, the new Air is definitely an option (a really cool one), especially if its price drops, which I’m pretty sure it will.

This morning at mass the priest reminded us about how wealth belongs to God and how Catholics should actively aid the needy. This is indeed true, and I do wish more people would actively push for this. But at the same time, I’m weary about the political perspective of modern liberalism on this particular topic— raise taxes, especially disproportionately on the more well-off, and have the government redistribute wealth.

Many Western liberal democracies have a history of excellent, trustworthy civil service. As I’ve studied in my Introduction to Comparative Politics class here, France’s people, for centuries now, have been looking up to their government’s efficient, well-tuned civil service to take care of everything. The United States, however, has never had a widely-respected bureaucracy. (In my opinion, the national bureaucracy lumped under the executive branch isn’t even constitutional, since Congress “created” it without properly attempting to amend the Constitution to allow for it. Congress was never given the power to delegate powers from the legislative to executive branches of government. This, however, belongs to another discussion and is not even one that can be remedied easily.) Not even trusting the national bureaucracy, how could American citizens so easily expect the government to efficiently distribute billions of tax dollars to the poor? It really doesn’t just logically happen.

Now, if, on the other hand, you think you can trust the government with that money, and not simply organize your own method of helping the poor, then think about the morality of the issue. If a government mandates certain taxes so that it can supposedly give to the poor, people across the country are practically being held at gunpoint to help the needy. Where are the civil liberties in that one? On the other hand, if people voluntarily and passionately organize into an efficient, moral organization (or organizations) that strictly focuses on social justice— collecting and distributing (God’s) wealth to the poor, I can assure you that something would get done. Are the people who call for absolute social justice through modern liberalism actively helping those in need, or are they just demanding that everyone be forced to do so by a government backed by the most powerful military in the world?

I’m not saying that we should totally obliterate social welfare. I probably haven’t studied enough economics and sociology to make that judgment. I do, however, wish people would stop pushing for a big government to handle people’s money for them (without asking!) instead of simply using the same passion to donate and help the needy themselves. As for people who don’t care about helping the poor, let them keep to themselves, and, for those of us who do care, let’s do something on our own instead of angrily forcing everyone to follow us. Let’s have neither minority oppressing majority, nor majority oppressing minority.

This past week I had a serious problem with this computer, my MacBook— serious problem as in unfixable problem. My hard disk apparently died. I got the spinning beach ball of death, which I tried to remedy by attempting to force quit things and/or wait for several minutes like I usually do. Nothing helped, so I turned it off, waited a bit, and (tried to) boot it up again. But no, it wouldn’t boot! Instead, I got the question mark folder of doom, which, unfortunately, I can’t find a picture of anywhere, since you don’t get to take screenshots when your OS is still booting, and I forgot to take a picture of it. So I tried various ways to remedy this, but failed, largely because the OS X installer’s First Aid utility wouldn’t even detect my hard disk at all. Great… After some more frustration and finally deciding that the hard disk was definitely most likely dead, I put my ear to the keyboard and could hear regular clicking sounds emanating from somewhere in my laptop. Not good, but I already decided it was dead anyway. Luckily I have things backed up, for the most part, from… well, a month ago. Better than nothing, I suppose.

But there’s more to the story! I mean, I guess it’s bad I lost some data, but sometimes you get bad hard disks, and I don’t think you can really blame the whole thing on Apple. Here’s why. I made an appointment online with the Genius Bar at the local Apple store for the next day, and so, after coming home from school and falling asleep for a little bit, I paid them a visit. After waiting just for a few minutes, I got to tell one of the employees my story, and he verified that my problem was indeed a problem. After looking around some more, he promptly said in the same matter-of-fact manner with which doctors tell bad news, “Okay, your hard disk has died.” I guess if I was still thoroughly shocked I would’ve been even more shocked, but by this time I’d already accepted the fate of my computer. So then, I left it there, being given the expectation of “one or two days” of wait time before picking it up again.

The next day, I picked it up again, and my hard disk was replaced, as I expected. However, there was one thing unexpected they did as well. I had the nasty orange discoloration problem at the palm rest areas, and I didn’t tell them about it (although it was pretty obvious), because I only wanted one issue to be resolved at a time— but also because I’d heard bad reports that people would have to send their MacBooks in for two or three weeks at a time to get the keyboard area cover replaced, and that sometimes the repair people would mess up other things as well.

But in addition to replacing my 80GB SATA HDD, they replaced the keyboard area cover without my knowledge beforehand, and none of these bad things have happened. I’m using the computer now, and I have a working hard disk, a white keyboard area cover, and a sensitive mouse click button again (had to be replaced too, since it was also affected by the discoloration problem). So, in the end, I’m very satisfied with Apple’s customer support. I asked for one thing because my hard disk died (although it probably shouldn’t have), and they also fixed another thing that had been annoying me since the first or second week I had this MacBook. Perhaps it’s compensation, in a sense, but regardless, it was a little something that made me feel a lot better.

Excepting those issues I’ve mentioned above, I’ve really had no problems with this MacBook at all. I love the interface. Exposé is extremely useful on such a small (1280×800) screen. Quicksilver is the ultimate application launcher and so much more. The MagSafe power adapter has saved me on several occasions. And there are various other cool upsides of having a MacBook or just Mac OS X, which I may explore individually in depth at a later time.

I’d been meaning to write a review on this computer since I got it in June, and I hope this makes up for it.