I just took the MBA on a trip from SFO to Hartford, CT. Now, I'm not your average owner, I'm a professional speaker who always travels with two lappys. Since I couldn't trust the MBA yet to fulfill my main presentation's job as a speaker (it wasn't ready for a gig yesterday, but today I will find out for sure because I needed an MPEG player plug-in to play my Keynote vids), I had to bring my MacBook in addition to my Sony TZ.
You should have seen the TSA screener's surprise when I whipped out three lappys at SFO's security checkpoint!
Now, mind you, I almost always travel business class, so I'm totally skewed in my opinion, but you can take it for what it's worth. *Even* in U.S. business class (not international airlines, of course, those have so much more space), the MBA is too big. A cool chick in front of me, which are rare indeed in business class
, leaned back suddenly and almost cracked my LCD display in half!
I luckily moved quickly enough but I can see that if you're half asleep and dozing off, someone is going to have their MBA crushed by the next person, in the near future!
And dealing with airlines is not easy. I recently had an Iberia flight attendant spill wine on a six-week old Sony TZ and she ruined the keyboard. Had to ship it back to Japan to have it fixed. Iberia said they would pay for damages, but so far they have ignored both a registered and overnight claim letters, ***holes!
Anyway, so besides the too-big form factor, I would also note that the MBA suffers from a short battery life to make it the ideal travel companion. At it's lowest display setting and with Wi-Fi turned off, I was barely able to eek out 3.5 hours of use.
That need will go away when I pick up my airplane adapter this weekend, which I foolishly forgot to buy on Monday, but still, the MBA gets wiped out in that department by the Sony TZ. Then again the TZ doesn't run OS X cleanly, has no backlit keyboard and certainly is no match in the comfy keyboard department, and forget wireless back-up!
That I could carry three lappys in my Swiss Army bag is a testament to the light weight of the TZ and MBA, but not the MacBook because that's a friggen boat anchor compared to the former two!
So, phuleeze Steve, just get yourself some bifocal contact lenses and give us that 12-inch MacBook we so desparately want. Footprint is the MBA's most serious shortcoming, if you're always near a powered seat. I hope this helps!
