No.

In the last two days, I've been repeatedly asked when I was going to buy the MacBook Air. For those of you who have been living under a rock in Botswana, the Mac Air was announced two days ago. It's a new laptop that fits in a manila envelope, supposedly because hey, some times you have to go places, you don't have your laptop bag, but you do have a manila envelope. Bang! Your set.

I heard this a lot when the iPhone came out. Apparently there is some perception among the masses that I buy gadgets the moment they are released. This is not true. I like to wait until someone buys them for me.

Chances are I won't go for the MacBook Air for a number of reasons, which I will list thusly:

1) 80 gig hard drive. I have 80 gigs worth of photos of Zoe. Also, the standard hard drive is the one used in the iPod, which, as much as I love my iPod, feels dirt slow for computer use. Yes, I know there's a solid state upgrade, but it's bajillion bucks.

2) Sealed battery. That's right - when your battery dies, you can't go on ebay and buy one. You go to the Apple store. Did you know that when you walk into the Apple store with a problem only they can fix, that a light flashes in the back and an employee immediately orders P.F. Chang carryout for the whole team, because they are going to CASH IN on you, bubba.

3) Dumb name. No one over 30 can look at the name and not think of tennis shoes. What's next, the Dell Pump? I think it should have been the MacBook Wafer. Or the Wedgie. See reason #4.

4) Lack of symmetry. OK, this is a weird reason, I'll admit, but it bugs me that it's wedge shaped. In nature, symmetry is beauty. To me, even though it's elegantly skinny, this thing looks like a very expensive wheel chock for a Lear jet.

Of course, if someone wants to buy one for me, I could be persuaded to give it a fair testing....

EDIT: Check out the Mac ad on the right sidebar of today's New York Times (at least it's on this morning...). Pretty clever use of something that none of us generally notice - ads on the internet.