Only 5 hours post-purchase, I already feel like an ass for spending a hot wad of money on what should be a sub $1000 laptop.
In the last 18 months I've owned a bottom-of-the-line white MacBook standard, a decked out 3GB MacBook Pro, and a just-for-screwing-around-on-a-huge-monitor-without-having-to-plug-a-laptop-in Mac Mini. They've all been semi-recently; all were Core 2s. The backstory is so that no one falls under the misimpression that I'm new to macs or OS X and thinks that that may have skewed my experience.
Initial impressions:
The keyboard. The keyboard is EXCELLENT! I was surprised. I've not enjoyed any of the other mac keyboards I've used in the past, and although the visual impression from the AIR keyboard might make it seem similar to the MacBook keyboard, it's way mo betta. Significantly, noticeably better. I'm actually enjoying typing on it.
Battery life. I was really excited to see a 5+ hours battery life rating on Apple.com. It was one of the major selling points for me taking the thing home. Put to a RL test, however, that claim is hot, stinking, BULLSHIT. I've been untethered for around 50 minutes and my battery's at 63%. Bluetooth off. No audio. Just Firefox running consistently with about 10 tabs and one 5-10 minute remote desktop session to an instance of Server 2008. I effing hate lofty promises. But that's not what this was. This was a straight up fib.
Touchpad. Apple never fails to deliver bottom-of-the-line, half-ass touchpads. It's unbelievably silly to me that they try to guise blatant, pointless nonconformity as innovation or style. Not including a right mouse button is literally ridiculous. It goes against every rule in the book of usability. That's not what I meant by bottom-of-the-line though. The actual interaction with the surface and its responsiveness and accuracy is what I meant. Touchpad rating: 2 / 5 stars, because it does, more or less, work. For an example of a highly-effective, quality touchpad, check out the textured, vallied touchpads that HP has been putting on its latest tablets.
Quietness. This laptop is anything but quiet. On a clean, cold surface, it still got silly loud for around 20 minutes with few programs running. At this exact moment it's being quiet, probably because it realizes I'm writing this post. This was the absolute biggest disappointment for me. What good is ultra-portability at the cost of anonymity? It's embarrassing to have a loud laptop, not to mention distracting.
Graphics. I have a desk in the 'leisure computing' room in my house with a quaint 26" 1366 x 768 (Apple uses 1360 x 768 though) monitor where I hooked the AIR up. This is where the Mini had been connected and rendered with beautifully clear text and precision. The AIR though? I'm not sure if it just has phenomenally inferior graphics capabilities or what, but that text would NOT GET SHARP. It was so blurry I kind of cursed and my eyes hurt. I tried everything. I also rediscovered that you can't legitimately turn off a mac laptop monitor and only use an external one without getting hacky. How ridiculous is that? How much energy does that waste for people that never figure out how to get around it? Green is trendy now, Apple. Come on. If there's one thing you go for it's trendy.
Performance. I had high hopes for Leopard. I'd been praying that they'd focused more on performance, so that using a mac would finally feel like using a real computer. A 1.66 Ghz Core 2 Duo with 2GB of RAM is plenty of hardware, especially if you elect not to run Apache/CF/MySQL on it, and throw a server in your living room. But, to my unavoidable disgust, this laptop, out of the box, is already strugglesomely slow. Slow slow slow slow slow. I have a Dell M1330 with a Core 2 1.83 Ghz running Vista Ultimate / IIS 7 / MySQL / CF 8 and it smokes the hell out of this thing.
Extensibility. MacBook Air? Oh, it comes with a maximum of 2 GB of RAM. Oh, and if you want a SLIGHTLY faster processor and a smaller and arguably better performing hard drive, it's a few grand more. Note: I had an 64GB SSD drive on one of my previous Dell laptops and the performance differentiation in ordinary developer (Flash, CF, AJAX) stuff was imperceptible.
Bottom line: Although I haven't tested Windows on the hardware configuration yet, this laptop is a rough reality check. I expected something impressive, easier-to-use-than-its-precedent, and capable. What I got is a 'business' laptop that looks kind of stupid but is way thin so there's that. At least I have that. My favorite thing about the laptop? The fact that it's thin and light. It does that very well. Unamongst other things.