Interesting news for those of you who may be shopping for a new commuting notebook…. (and thats the last time I’ll qualify writing about gadgets on a commuting blog ;)…

Steve Jobs announced the MacBook Air ultraportable notebook at the annual MacWorld conference in San Francisco, and its causing quite a stir.

It the slimmest notebook ever made, and at 3 lbs is very light especially considering it has a 13.3″ screen like a regular MacBook. The 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU is impressive considering that most ultraportables top out with Intel’s 1.2 GHz Core 2 Duo.

One serious drawback of the notebook which has everyone grumbling is that the RAM, hard drive, and battery are all sealed into the system and not replaceable by the user. Apple notes that this is because sealing it in allows them to achieve the notebook’s ultraslim form factor, rather then creating multiple removable bays.

For the bulk of regular users who never swap out their batteries this is no big deal, especially since you can get a new battery at the Apple store installed for $129, which is actually a pretty good deal for a 5-hr battery. So, after a couple of years if your original battery is inevitably no longer holding charge, you have a solution.

For mobile professionals who wouldn’t leave their home without a second battery, however, this could be a show stopper.

The battery is rated at 5 hours, and many will rightfully argue that that is an excellent runtime that ought to accommodate anyone, since it can easily handle a cross-country flight.

Well, thats true, with power management and topping off the battery just before the flight, you should be fine. But if you killed time at the airport wifi at the gate, or in your hotel lobby waiting for a car, and used it for watching video you might not even make it through the flight - and certainly wouldn’t survive an international flight.

Also, some people actually *use* their CPU (like, say, developers, photographers, or filmmakers), and we all know that a ‘5-hr’ battery is actually about 60-90 minutes when the CPU is really chugging.

The RAM isn’t too much of an issue since it comes with 2GB and thats just fine for most people. Usually a RAM upgrade is only for people who want to save money on the purchase by buying the notebook with low RAM and replacing it with larger-capacity commodity RAM. I am not very familiar with any consumer apps on Leopard which would want more than 2GB.

Then there is the hard drive issue. This one is a stickler. Jobs notes that the MacBook Air comes with an “80GB hard drive (which) provides plenty of storage space”. 80GB? Is this the same guy who is selling us 160GB iPods?

This is one area I would actually bump up against - the hard drive. I *always* upgrade my notebook hard drive. Inevitably the best performing and largest aftermarket notebook hard drives are a better deal then the highest-end option on, say, a Dell configuration. If I don’t upgrade it right after purchase, I will sometime by the time I get a new one.

Now, I’m sure that Genius bar would be happy to upgrade your hard drive to, say, the 64 GB SSD option, or a faster or larger drive that might come out for the Air sometime down the road - but they sure arent going to let you bring in your 200GB Hitachi 7k2000 or MTRON SSD you bought off of NewEgg or DVNation.

Speaking of the SSD option, Apple is charging an outrageous amount of money for this upgrade, and word is that it isn’t much of an upgrade at all.
The notebook will compete with the likes of the XPS 1330 and Sony Vaio TZ series.