The MacBook Air does look appealing. It's light, small, and looks great. I was a little surprised when I saw that two fellow Rails programmers, David Hansson (The inventor of Rails and blogger) and Geoffrey Grosenbach (Peepcode), actually bought the devices!

David actually posted a blog entry on the 37signals blog, Signals vs Noise on his new purchase.

David writes:

I’ve now been using the Air for some time as my only laptop. The Pro still hasn’t left the desktop and I doubt it ever will while I own it. My girlfriend replaced her regular MacBook with an Air as well. The verdict after extended use? L-o-v-i-n-g it. Both of us.

Also, Geoffery Grosenbach weighs in farther down the page:

I’ve been editing 80+ page documents in InDesign on my 1.6 GHz Air with no problems. It’s a great machine. If you are happy with your current machine, don’t touch an Air! The size and weight differences are very noticeable after only a few days of use.

My knocks on the air are the small hard drive capacity, and the non-replaceable battery. Also, the missing DVD drive! It's a huge pain in the ass to install software without a dvd drive. Ok, It can be done.

I'm a software programmer who works on Macs primarily. Two years ago I bought on the of the first MacBook Pros. I ordered the device at work and some of the people there thought I was nuts for getting a laptop with 2 gigs of ram. 2 gigs is the standard now and I'm glad that the Air comes with 2 gigs standard.

I'm primarily a rails developer, but I also have an ADC select membership. My Macbook Pro does not have a Dual Layer DVD burner, and I'm too lazy to buy one for the Mac. I was kinda screwed during Leopard's development period (Summer 06 to when it was released last year) when I wanted to install the OS on my machine. I had to resort to restoring the disk image off of my 30 gig iPod to use as an installation medium. Later, I bought some backup hard drives and made a ten gig partition as a staging ground. I seriously should have bought an external dvd drive.

Regardless, Just how the hell does Apple expect people with MacBook Airs to install the next version of OSX? Expect them to buy a hard drive and do what I did? Buy the external dvd drive? Use their iPods?

Let's not even get into the non-replaceable battery issue..

Side note: I think the next version will be Mac OS X 10.6: Lion

I guess we'll just find out next summer when WWDC rolls around.