THIN end of the wedge?

MacBook Air. Nice eh?. Apples' newest and the world's thinnest laptop is one of those products that just makes you want it. A fully featured laptop, never the less the Air has had to make some compromises in the name of sveltness (if that's even a word), namely a decent set of ports and an optical drive.

OK so you can add on a small superdrive and attach ethernet via the USB dongle thingey but that kind of goes against the whole spirit of the thing.

While some people are happy to loose a few ports and a drive, others have been less convinced. Supporters point to Apples history of dropping old technology. The iMac G3 dropped the floppy drive and that worked out just fine.

But I think that the Air is pointing to something else entirely. Lack of an optical drive may make getting applications and data onto the Air slower than a slow thing using wireless but wireless speeds are only going to increase and who needs to load up large apps if all the ones you need are freely available on the web.

Two hundred years ago (in computer years - so around 10 real years), the buzz word in computing was Thin Clients. Small computers that held no data. All a users files and applications would be held on a remote server. This would make Thin clients cheap to make and easy to maintain. Sadly the march of tech ensured that what people actually wanted was bigger and faster machines.

But do they still want this? Most computers are already way to fast for their users and the MHz race seems to have died down. Most computers now come with all the RAM in the world pre installed too. So maybe the Air is the first and the last. The last of the old type of computer, huge hard drive stuffed to bursting point with data, the first of the new breed. Light and agile, pulling your data down from the mobile internet when needed and processing it on web based applications.

OK, so maybe not yet, but soon. Expect the Air2 to have less rather than more but actually do more rather than less.