OK, this one is probably akin to "Lennon lives, McCartney is dead" but hey, this is my blog and I can write what I want. And as it happens I'm still not quite done with Apple's new portable, the Macbook Air.

As I wrote in my last post I have a hard time seeing the potential market for this product, but perhaps this is just the way Apple planned it? The ultra-thin enclosure and solid-state drive is new stuff for Apple and maybe, just maybe, they're not 100% confident that everything will run smoothly with this first generation product.

So, to avoid risking extreme expenditeur and an outright scandal, it would make sense to roll out a product that only sold in relatively modest numbers. This would give them a lot of valuable feedback about how this stuff works in the real world.

Perhaps it all started something like this:

Yesterday Steve Jobs, Mr. Black Turtleneck himself, took the podium to reveal Apple's latest Macintosh computer. Their new baby, an ultra-thin portable named Macbook Air looks dead gorgeous. Immediately my geek-heart started throbbing for this newest and most precious piece of industrial-design.

But just one day later I have a hard time seeing the point of Apple's latest creation. Who is it for? Where are the benefits? The "Air" is incredibly thin but it still has the exact same footprint as the cheaper and better equipped Macbook. And the Air is actually 100% unusable for stuff life wide-editing as it does not sport a firewire-port. This means there's no direct way to get footage onto the machine, no practical way to edit, as the included HD is too small and too slow. In other words 1/3 of the iLife-suite is next to useless on this thing.

What's really worrying is that this resembles the G4-cube so much it's almost hard to believe. For those of you who don't remember the G4 Cube was one of Apple's very few clear misses since Steve Jobs returned to the company. When released it was in many ways the pinnacle of industrial design. It looked gorgeous it was completely quiet (no fans) and was put together in a manner that still impress. There was only one problem: It was more expensive than the better specified PowerMacs of the time. So, why most people agreed the Cube was a brilliant piece of hardware-enginering "no-one" bought one. Now I'm not putting all my money on the bet that this thing is going to flop, but I think it's a distinct possibility.

It's useless for video-editing. For journalists the inability to switch battery-packs is probably a deal-breaker. For photographers the glossy-screen is no good. For the average punter it is too expensive for what i does. It's probably the most brilliant surf-the-web-write-an-essay-do-small-stuff-machine(tm) ever released. But here's the thing: I want one, but I don't think I'd buy one...