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From Rob Griffiths:

Like most everyone else, I suspect, I was blown away by the MacBook Air’s reveal Tuesday. As a long-time fan of ultra-small notebooks (we still own and use a 12-inch PowerBook G4 in the Griffiths household), my initial reactions involved reaching for my credit card and loading Apple’s store in my browser. These feelings were reinforced even more by a visit to the Apple booth, where picking up the little machine probably doesn’t even count as exercise. There’s no denying that the design—curves everywhere, with nary a straight corner to be found—and lack of weight in this machine are truly amazing. It makes my 15-inch MacBook Pro look and feel like a lead paperweight by comparison.

But then—rare, for me—reason intervened and started posing questions that I should answer before purchasing the machine. “So what happens, Rob, when the hard drive has an error and you have to reinstall OS X?” OK, that seems easy enough. I’ll just boot off the Leopard DVD…oh wait, no, I won’t do that unless I fork over the extra $99 for the USB-powered SuperDrive. OK, so I’ll use FireWire Target Disk Mode…nope, won’t do that either, as there’s no FireWire port (and I confirmed with an Apple representative that there’s no “USB Target Disk Mode” option.) And I won’t be able to use that cool and oh-so-handy “borrow a drive from another Mac” feature, as the hard drive won’t be bootable. So barring the extra $99 for the SuperDrive, the only solution will be to boot from a USB2 hard drive that’s been prepared with a disk-based version of the OS X installer.

But really, how often does a hard drive get an error like this? Not so often, and $99 is a small price to pay for insurance, so the SuperDrive solves that problem. Time to order! “Not so fast, Griff! What about the hard drive space? 80GB isn’t much by today’s standards.” While that’s true, in a small ultra-mobile Mac, I’m willing to take the tradeoff in drive space. Even on my MacBook Pro, I’m only using 85GB of the 120GB space I have available. So really, this isn’t a major issue—besides, I fully expect that some enterprising soul will demonstrate that Toshiba’s new 160GB 1.8-inch hard drive works just fine in the MacBook Air, and they’ll probably do so within a day or two of the machine’s availability in two weeks.

So it’s time to order, right? I’ve been waiting for years, after all! “Well, just hang on a sec. There’s One More Thing you need to think about. You do realize, don’t you, that the battery isn’t removable?” What?

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