People who know me know that I like my gadgets. The money that some people would put into high-end suits, shoes or watches is money I put into electronics. The latest goodie is a MacBook Air with 64mb SSD. I’ve gotten a lot of questions, so I figured I’d put some thoughts here.

First of all, I don’t get it with all the “haters.” A lot of people have roundly trounced the MBA because it doesn’t have a built-in optical drive, and because it only has a single USB port and no built-in 3G modem. I can’t say any of these things has really been an issue for me.

When I frame-up the MBA in my mind, I put it against a Sony VGN-T250P, a Sony UX180p and a OQO Model 02a that I’ve owned in the past. All the machines are meant to be light and portable, and each makes sacrifices in its own way.
I have to say that the OQO was basically worthless for me. It was slow, and the battery was dead within 90 minutes. Just opening the “wireless control panel” to switch from WiFi to 3G (Verizon) took forever. And the 3G coverage throughout hilly Seattle was spotty at best.

The Sony T-series (now TZ-series) is nice, no doubt about it. In many ways, it is more portable than the MBA because it’s the size a woman would call a “clutch” vs. the MBA’s “purse.” (The MBA is lighter and thinner, for sure.) The smaller screen and keyboard on the Sony doesn’t bother me, and the battery life rocks. With the new extended battery I just got through the Sony Battery Replacement Program, the machine can last for more than 6 hours of standard use.

But the Sony’s weak spot is its operating system and crapware. It took me almost a full day to get all the Sony and 3rd-party apps I didn’t want off the machine. And when I tried to upgrade the T250 to Vista, the sound card didn’t work and the battery life went down from 6 hrs. to 1.5. So I’m back on the near end-of-life XP operating system, although the new Sony TZ-series runs Vista no problem to be fair.

The MBA wins out in this ultramobile showdown because Apple has been absolutely nailing it with Mac OS X lately. Not only do a I get a great experience on the Web in Safari 3.1 or Firefox. I also get the killer Apple software like iTunes, iPhoto and iWork. (I haven’t touched PowerPoint since Keynote came along, and Pages lets me be more flexible with my word processing than I’ve been since the old Aldus PageMaker days in the early 90’s.)

The biggest surprise, though, has been that it’s been easier to setup, partition and use my development/hosting tools on the Mac than on Windows. I tried to get some SQL Server 2000 data into SQL Server 2005 from a .bak file with all the right permissions to re-activate an old ASP bit of code. But after a full day of pulling hair, I launched XAMPP on the Mac and converted the .bak file into MySQL while rewriting the ASP as PHP. Done and working in a few hours flat.

Ironically, the Sony UX180p recently went from the same “useless” category as the OQO Model 02a to the second favorite slot among home machines because of Apple. Or should I say because of the Apple community, which has done some excellent work on the OSX86 project. I’m currently running Leopard 10.5.1 on my Sony UX180p w/o any real issues whatsoever and it is great to have a machine that small with my favorite software at the ready.

So I guess the only other thing to say is about the issue of the “missing” internal 3G in the MBA. I don’t get it. I would have to pay at least another $60/mo. to activate a new device built-in to my laptop. Alternately, I can just tether an existing 3G device to the MBA via USB or Bluetooth and pay anything from nothing to $15/mo., depending on the carrier. I can’t evenimagine a scenario where I would have my laptop but not my mobile phone, so what’s the big deal?

In many ways, the MBA was exactly the machine I’ve been waiting for — lightweight, thin and decent battery life w/ good performance to boot. That’s not to say I’m not already eyeing more new tech toys for the house. Let’s hope those “Startup 2.0″ shares hit it big soon!