Living in the Future

We’re living in the future, and I’ll tell you why: if you’re drinking water and breathing air in a time when a Steve Jobs-helmed Apple Inc. maintains stock keeping units for both a handheld computing device and an ultra-portable sub-notebook (the thinnest notebook on the market, no less), then clearly you’ve left behind the constraints of late 20th and early 21st century life and entered the wide, wonderful world of science fiction.

Back then, back in the distant past, Apple only ever entertained products that could fit inside a conveniently simplistic matrix of desktops and laptops of two grades: consumer or professional. To ask for a device of a more unusual order — something of the sort that even Apple’s less prolific rivals were regularly shipping even a decade ago — was a farcical daydream. Want to carry around an Apple-branded data device in your pocket? Want to tote around a Macintosh laptop all day without bringing on spinal injury? It just wasn’t done, son.

But now, today, we’ve got the MacBook Air, a laptop so thin and light it’s named after a shoe. At just three pounds, it fits inside a manila envelope, and is practically guaranteed to bring about envy in those with heavier laptops for at least the next three months. It’s not perfect — no Ethernet port, no FireWire port, and no swappable battery — but you know what? I’ll take it. After all those years of unrequited pining for a sub-notebook, the future looks just fine.