The MacBook Air is a dramatic departure for Apple: it's a narrowly-targeted hardware product. The geeks on the forums hate it because their rumor-fuelled dreams have been dashed and they will have to keep lugging their 12" PowerBooks around for a few more years. But then the geeks are not the target market for this product and they don't seem to understand that large, profitable markets for highly cost-controlled products exist outside of their domain.

Apple has plenty of narrowly-targeted software products (Final Cut Pro for instance) and these don't attract the same howls of derision. But then those products target markets by adding specialized features and charging appropriately. Taking features away, as Apple did with iMovie in iLife08, is bound to cause geek grief because the expectation exists that the monotonic march toward "better" is always along the "more" axis. Not so. So who will be buying the world's thinnest laptop?

A simple answer: anyone who values it highly enough.

That will include executives and sales people who travel, present, and are seen with their laptop in important business situations. They value low weight and looks above everything else. They already have a Mac at home, including maybe a MacBook of some sort, but they will still buy a MacBook Air because it gives them the things they cannot get otherwise. This is the Miata of the laptop world: a second or third purchase after the most critical needs have been fulfilled, only for those who have the juice to make what they want real.

MacBook Air is clearly a companion computer. Apple has stripped everything from it that is not necessary in order to save weight and space. What is left is an interesting set: wireless Ethernet, audio out, video out, and USB 2.0. Those cover what must be the four most numerous connections on the planet right now. And once you pair it with a companion Mac, you have everything you need for anything.

The breathtaking omission for many is that the battery is built-in. But why are batteries removable in the first place? Removable batteries represent a huge additional cost in every aspect of Apple's business: more design, more material, more safety concerns, more stock, more line items, more connectors, more testing; the list goes on and on. The overall product design gains enormously by building the battery in, as Apple has shown with the iPod and, more recently, the iPhone.

To me, the inclusion of a back-lit full-size keyboard cements the target market as that of highly mobile, highly responsible, highly visible individuals whose time and presence carries a high price. We'll be seeing lots of these in the real world, many of them in dim lighting and accompanied by the whirr of a projector fan.

Tags: MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Apple, Macworld, Drama, Lust