Joshua Ochs

Mac App Store != iOS App Store.

There are many things that are allowed on a computer platform that Apple isn't going to sanction for their more appliance-like iOS platform.

Actually, according to the data, no it doesn't. Chris has his facts here correct.

Consumer Reports is wrong in this instance, and it does not reflect well on their magazine that they're persisting in this.

AnandTech has published their data - where is CR's?

QuickTime X simply wasn't fully done when it shipped. Early reports indicate that the editing features from QuickTime 7 are now available in the QTX player, so 7 should be a thing of the past (like Rosetta, etc).

Yes, you're a troll. I'll still bite. Apple hasn't removed any of the existing ports (yet). Assuming the technology takes off - still a big "if" - then you'll be able to get adapters from anyone you please, including Apple.

If this does take off though, we'll have future super-thin laptops that only need a tiny port or two to handle all of today's connectivity, and with better performance and simpler cabling to boot.

"Your iPad would sync in seconds"

Except that the bottleneck will now be the flash in the iPad and speed of iTunes, not the connection.

I haven't seen any evidence - yet - of hubs. All examples have been daisy-chained.

The logic at the time was that Apple didn't make anything remotely like those 9-inch and 10-inch netbooks. The Air was over a grand *more*, and sometimes even slower thanks to the 1.8-inch hard drive (compared to SSD on the netbooks).

At the time it made some sense - but that value proposition has evaporated with the new Air at $999.

Cameron! Good to see you're commenting on TUAW. Didn't recognize you as tonyunreal or john.youngberg.

"Pardon my French, but Cameron is so tight that if you stuck a lump of coal up his ***, in two weeks you'd have a diamond." -- Ferris Beuller

(And thanks TAUW, for your filtering ruining a classic movie quote.)

I understand this completely, having gone the Hackintosh route on my Eee 901 for a couple years (mind you, it was a plaything - I've always had a MacBook Pro as my primary machine). Building a hackintosh isn't hard exactly, but it takes a lot of research and a LOT of maintenance. Innocuous updates can break anything from kernel sleep support to power management to sound to... well, yeah. Sure, given a few weeks, these are typically solved, but then you have to research the various forum threads to find the info and proper bits and pieces. More time, more effort. That said, having Mac OS X on a 9-inch netbook was a treat for those years (keyboard notwithstanding).

However, when I look at everything I did with the Eee 901 - tiny form factor, solid state drive, etc - and compare it to the 11-inch MacBook Air, I can't tell you how much I wish the new Air has existed back then. I spent close to a grand on my netbook - the Eee 901 was not cheap when it came out, nor was the third-party SSD - and it just didn't hold a candle to the design of the Air. If I still had that grand I'd probably buy an Air to sate my love of all things tiny and silent.

Hackintoshes can be fun and educational - I certainly enjoyed mine and learned a lot (possibly more than I wanted to about BIOS, DSDT, and bootloaders), but it's no substitute for a fully-supported system for getting work done.

Exactly. Anyone who actually reads up on the history of the Mac knows that he was briefly part of the original project team, but little if anything of his vision actually became part of the Mac or even influenced it. By far his largest contribution was bringing together the talent that DID build the Macintosh - Bill Atkinson, Burrell Smith, and Andy Hertzfeld (among many others).