I’ve been waiting for an ultraportable from you for over a year. I’ve been holding my breath (figuratively) for days before your Keynotes, hoping I’ll be able to trade you my money for a new laptop. All I want is a small laptop, like my 12 inch Powerbook (although preferably it would be smaller).

Steve…this isn’t it. Not even close. There are three dimensions of size. You made the MacBook Air thinner and lighter, but the damned thing has exactly the same foot print as the 13 inch Macbook. In fact, it is a more expensive, fewer USB ports, no Firewire, non-replaceable battery, no optical drive, slower chip, same foot print as the 13 inch Macbook.

This does not replace my nicely compact 12 inch Powerbook. Not by a long shot.

I haven’t read what other people are saying about it Steve, but unless something magic happens in the next two weeks and suddenly I can’t lift 5 pounds, but can still lift 3, I don’t think the Macbook Air will be on my shopping list.

As Tamar eagerly awaits the arrival of her MacBook, we (I) am faced with an interesting question: How best to run XP on it.

For Tamar this is a less important question as she can probably ignore Windows (as she has happily done since she got her first Mac at birth). I, however, have to use XP for certain applications. Currently I’m crawling around with VPC, so any of the solutions are an improvement, however the question is which one to use. Both have advantages and disadvantages. Since an XP license isn’t cheap, running both isn’t really an option.

So the question is, Parallels vs Boot Camp?

Parallels has two major advantages: 1) Fast Booting and 2) The ability to have XP and Mac OS running at the same time (as I do with VPC right now).

There are also some minor advantages, such as not partitioning the hard disk.

The major Con is that there is no direct access to the video card. This will limit PC gaming (and I may lose one of the function that I want to have but currently don’t with VPC). The Parrallels GUI is a bit sluggish, which won’t matter for work, but will matter for fun.

Neither support iSight, but I suspect Apple will fix that with the final release.

I guess the answer should be clear, but I’m still stuck on the video card problem. Parallels seems almost ideal…but not quite. Oh yes, and Tamar keeps say, “If I have to infect my computer with Windows, it better run games.” More to follow…