[Broco]

Yeah. It's thin all right. Well-specced and quiet too.

Not quite ideal though, considering what you're paying. The lack of optical drive has been widely noted, but there's also the matter that the battery is integrated, not good since batteries fail all the time. Also, the usual flaws of the MacBook -- mediocre keyboard and not enough USB ports -- are probably even worse on this. And I don't think thinness, aside from style points, is as important as lightness and smallness. Bottom line, I think this looks cool but there are too many kinks at this point for me to really consider buying it myself.

[Broco]

[Broco]

At this point they are only staying with the 1-button design because it's a part of their brand and they are afraid of a New Coke-type outcry.

I think it's really clever what they did on desktops with the Mighty Mouse: they entirely avoided the press harping they "gave in" to multiple buttons by making this weird-ass mouse that still looks like it has only one button and with extra features that let them pretend they are leaping ahead instead of catching up. Truly they're the kings of PR. Seems they haven't found an equivalent trick for laptops, though (aside from the annoying crap Tim mentioned).

[Broco]

I've heard repeatedly on techie forums that Vista suffers from many glitches across the board. E.g. a university store tech was saying that 80% of the laptops he was receiving for repair ran Vista and he saw all sorts of weird inexplicable shit. I've also heard that Microsoft employees don't want to use it on their home machines. And MS has issued patches for bugs that really should never have been there in the first place, like file copying was like 5x slower than it should be. All these rumors add up in my mind. Its general programming quality just seems to be low. If you didn't get this impression, it's probably just luck in your hardware and applications that avoided trouble.

I've used it briefly and I agree there are a lot of nice touches -- the least ugly default GUI theme yet, shorter system directory names, well-designed menus. But stability is much more important than this minor stuff.

Because of the bugginess and because there are no genuine killer features, I'm not convinced Vista will ever be the standard. Unless the service packs really fix things up properly, it may be skipped over for the next version of Windows by most users, like Windows ME.