My white, 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo Macbook is great, but it's, honestly, a little slow. I spoiled myself with a quad-core, 3 GHz AMD Propus on the desktop, which lets me know every time I use it that the Mac is a little sluggish.

The second gen Macbook Air was awesome, but slower than my Macbook. I'm not upgrading just for k3wl. I could resist it.

The new Macbook Air was going to be a different story. It would be a good deal faster than my Macbook. And lighter. The SSD really is really fast. It, like its predecessor, would have more horizontal resolution than my Macbook, which would be great for three-columned PHPStorm coding. And, of course, the MBA would be waaaay k3wler than the white plastic Macbook I'm typing on now.

Part of holding off on the 2nd gen MBA was telling myself I would buy when the new one hit. Until things got faster, it was insane to drop the cash. The little voice egging me on to buy was satisfied, and would wait.

The new MBA's hit now. As rumored, it is, seemingly, the perfect mobile laptop.

Of course, would-be fanboys like me always look for that one flaw that they can use to justify to their irrationally exuberant minds that they're again putting off a purchase. It was easy when the CPU in the MBA was slower. All I have now is the lack of RAM.

And I think the MBA's lack of RAM is enough. I had 2 Gigs of RAM in my Macbook for a while, and it simply didn't get the job done. Now with 5 gigs, I'm a very happy camper. Even my mother's mini didn't have enough RAM with 2 Gigs; I upped it to 5 today, in fact. I can't justify buying a machine with 2. The clearance MBAs start at $749, a price I could swing. The new MBAs are $999, and have with processors worth a purchase. But neither at those prices gives me 4 gigs of RAM. You can't even trick yourself into saying that you'll just update when you've got the cash. The RAM, unless something's changed, is soldered onto the MBA. It's fixed. No option to upgrade, ever.

I just can't bring myself to splurge $100 to only add more RAM. I'll confess, the "RAM is holding me back" excuse is a slightly irrational argument in itself, but it'll do. You really can't run OS X without 4 gigs, and over $1000 just doesn't seem like as good a deal. When these things were rumored to have 4 gigs minimum, I thought Irrational Apple-Buying Mind might have a winner. Boy, I barely dodged a buy.

I'm finding myself more inclined to grab the i3 Alienware m11x, which is now on sale for $700. Then I can still Windows game using my laptop, turn my tower over to Ubuntu for programming (and to escape the 32-bit Vista's 3 Gig RAM limitation), and have options when I'm mobile.

But honestly, that was a close one. I'm not convinced I'm out of the Macbook Air woods yet. The Mind might be back, unhappy with the prospects of an on-sale m11x. I've even had it suggest buying the new Mini for $600. Who needs a dedicated graphics chip for programming? Get it! It's a real, non-hackintosh Mac with an i5! Clever Mind.

(And no, no hard feelings at all for Apple killing the white Macbook. Look, mine's great, but everyone should be forced to buy the MBA instead. How often do I use its ethernet port, really? (Though, admittedly, I did today.) And it's not like it's got Firewire any more. Beyond burning an occasional mp3 CD and the possibility to grab 8 gigs of RAM, what's the loss?)

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