The Only Reason You Shouldn’t Buy A MacBook Air (Today)

Forbes’ Brian Caulfield observes that the word ‘compromise,’ is never part of Apple’s lexicon in its narrative about lthe company’s products, and that’s a shame, says Caulfield, because by his lights the MacBook Air is study in the power of compromise – less powerful than Apple’s other notebooks, equipped with fewer features, and in his estimation (a minority view I think) “uglier” than many of Apple’s other offerings.

Caulfield contends that the compromises add up to a better notebook – lighter, quicker to boot, affordable at the $999 entry-level price, and unless you’re a serious gamer or professional power-user editing video or somesuch, it’s just more practical, which explains why the second generation Air has been a hot seller since it was rolled out in October of last year.

However, now is not the time to run out and buy a MacBook Air, unless you find an exceptional deal on one of the current Air models, since it’s a near-certainty that a revision is in the works for release sometime in the next few weeks, with more powerful Intel Sandy Bridge Core “i” replacing the long-in-the-tooth Core 2 Duo silicon in the current models, plus Intel/Apple’s Light Peak based Thunderbolt ultra high speed I/O data interface and Mac OS X 10.7 Lion pre-installed, the latter presumed to be the product release holdup.

And while I disagree with Brian Caulfield about the “uglier” bit, I think he’s probably right about the compromises it incorporates making the MacBook Air the sensible laptop choice for most users’ actual needs.

As Steve Jobs said last October, this is the future of the notebook.