I know the apple users you are talking about. Some of them are Evangelistic in their promotion of all things apple. Others are the college set; the ones whose use of apple is incidental to whatever else they are doing.

I am also middle of the road. I like Linux and it gives me the freedom to set my computer up my way. But there are times when I need an app and trying to set it up on Linux is beyond reason. Those times are when I turn to other OS’s.

But for my main computer use, Linux is more than capable of meeting my needs.

Sorry.. I wasn’t making myself clear. I wasn’t referring to the entire Apple range and the entire Apple customer base when I said that they were after form over function. Just a particular end of the market who very certainly do, and these will be the target market for the Air if they have enough money to spend on it.

There is a very particular market that the Air is aimed at. And that was my point. The iChair reference was humor, but not far off the mark either. If you have ever been on a forum where someone wasn’t praising Apple enough, you know what kind of Apple user I mean.

There is a Linux counterpart, who insists that everyone should switch to Linux right now. From the most computer illiterate user to the biggest company, while underestimating the difficulty of such a task. They also have unrealistic impressions of things like WINE, which they belive will be perfectly adequate for replacing Windows completely for essential applications.

Personally I’m more a middle of the road person. I use Linux for the bulk of my computer needs, and I go out of my way to get the job done on Linux, but I can see times when another option is needed at the moment. Usually because I can’t find a Linux app to do the task.

Now back to the Air.

The Air is thin enough to be very fragile. So using it as an everyday portable laptop is impractical. Baggage handlers are not the most caring people when it comes to fragile equipment, and throwing it on the back seat of your car is not a good idea if there is anything that could fall onto it.

Due to it’s non removable battery, it isn’t something that someone can use all day for work away from a power point, so that also reduces the portable aspect, and as keeping a laptop battery topped up all the time can shorten it’s life span, putting it on charge every evening is not really practical.

Wireless only network connection rules out a lot of professional uses, as having to get a USB Ethernet dongle will further drain the power, and be one more accessory to carry around, for work and many other purposes, Wifi is not enough.

The 80 gig hard drive is by todays standards pretty small. So no heavy duty video editing, no carrying it around with all your media files etc.

A 13 inch screen isn’t really designed for intensive Photoshop sessions, and while I haven’t seen it, I doubt that the screen quality matches a professional graphic designer’s monitor.

The above pretty much rules out the pro users unless they want something cool to take to the next conference. Laptops have a hard short life. I’ve seen the way sales reps and other mobile workers tend to treat their equipment, so I can’t see an Air lasting more than a week in such environments. And the higher end stuff like graphic design is done with desktops, not laptops, so that leaves out Apple’s key creative market.

Using it as a desktop replacement kind of makes the thin lightweight part of the design futile, and any laptop is an ergonomic disaster for extended use.

Which leaves us with intermittent careful use in an environment where looks are the most important aspect. This is the poser market, which the Air is perfectly suited to.

However, I don’t know that “hype” is necessarily all the differentiation between Apples and other PCs. It surely wasn’t in 1984 when I bought my first Macintosh (I’d not seen the “1984″ ad) and it wasn’t in 1997 when I bought my last Macintosh. The ease-of-use was the deciding factor in every case. Windows PCs simply weren’t up to the capabilities of the Apple products. I didn’t want to learn different commands, keystrokes, or menus to do the same functionality from one program to the next. Apple was smart enough to start by defining what programs did and how they worked BEFORE the first Macs appeared.

Because both are relatively similar, what’s to keep someone from installing Linux on an Air? I’m not saying it’s necessary, just possible. A dual-boot Air? Now that’s a PC that has something for everyone… except with a high-end price. Think Porsche with interchangeable engines - turbo for speed, diesel for economy.

The Eee is priced at the bottom end of the market, minimalist spec, and is something new and different. It’s aimed at the opposite end of the computer market. It does a fantastic job at a cut throat price, and it has the added advantage of running Linux. The fun comes from hacking and tweaking it, and getting it to do what nobody thought it could do.

The Air is aimed at someone posing in Starbucks. Its a fashion statement, not a computer. It’s major point of differentiation form anything else… It’s thin.

Apple sell to a market who seem more concerned with form than anything else.

Lets be honest.. If the posts on the tech forums I have seen today are anything to go by, Apple could get their congregation to willingly impale themselves on 3 foot long metal spikes if they told them it was the iChair, and gave it a nice finish and an iPod dock, and then berate everyone who pointed out the disemboweling aspect as Apple Haters who are just not cool enough to understand the right way to sit comfortably around the iChair. These are not Eee users.