Last week I posted about having a less capable (more focused?) laptop make for a more productive environment.

Being in the market for another Mac, and on the verge of purchasing another MacBook, I decided to pickup a MacBook Air.

Why?

While at the Apple store I spent an hour actually using the Air. Not just surfing the net and drooling over the design or coolness of it, but actually downloading the tools I use every day and doing a little work.

After an hour, I came to the conclusion that it was good enough and in fact superior in important ways.

First, the screen is amazingly bright and consistent. Viewing an LCD screen for 10-18 hours a day, like I do, the LED backlighting makes a huge difference.

Second, the keyboard the most solid laptop keyboard I have used. It feels like a desktop keyboard, not the mushy or bouncy feel most laptops have.

Coupled with the amazing build quality and light weight, it is a pleasure to take everywhere I go.

After, using it for a week do I regret anything?

Nope.

It is one of the most pleasurable computing experiences I have ever had.

Is 2 gigs of memory enough? Yep.

More memory is always good, so I hope Apple offers a build to order option for 4 gigs in the near future.

Can you live without a DVD drive? Maybe. The Air’s Remote Disk feature worked fine, though it took 3 hours to install Mac OS X via my Airport Extreme.

Is an 80GB hard drive large enough? Barely. After installing all the essential applications and work tools, I have 33 gigs free, but my iTunes or iPhoto libraries add up to 26 gigs, so I am holding offer copying them over until I make sure they are not unnecessarily bloated.

What would I change?

Other than a larger hard drive, not much.

If Apple can swing a 100-120 gig drive, build to order memory upgrades for 4 gigs I would be in nirvana, not just smitten with this computer.