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Beautiful, slim, and very light, the MacBook Air is an eye-catchingly elegant machine to behold, but once you've stopped drooling over her aesthetically pleasing attributes and begun to look a little deeper, you see that this beauty queen of notebooks suffers some major deficits in comparison to her huskier cousin, the MacBook Pro, particularly in terms of processing power and speed.

Without question, the most obvious feature of the new belle on the notebook circuit is the MacBook Air's trim form. Measuring in at just 0.76 inches, she is 24% slimmer than the bulkier 1 inch of the MacBook Pro, trimming down to a mere 0.16 inches at her extremities. MacBook Air weighs in at a very trim 3 lbs, which is 2 lbs lighter than the MacBook Pro. But as we know, size isn't everything, and when you consider her price tag and look at what the Apple design team made to omit in order to achieve this new trimmer form, you begin to wonder if the sacrifice were really worth it.

In order to shave 0.24 inches from her girth, Apple designers removed all optic drives and all but one USB port. They also did away with any mobile broadband, ethernet connectivity, SD card slots and Firewire connection. Innovative, yes, but whether this is practical when put to the test is yet to be seen.

With her svelte, light weight body, MacBook Air is definitely designed to take full advantage of a wireless world, with next generation wireless technology and Bluetooth connectivity a definite highlight. Though it should be pointed out that there is a major disadvantages to being totally wifi reliant: In order to install software, view a DVD or photos stored on a CD, the MacBook Air needs to remotely connect to a nearby PC or Mac that has the necessary optic drives (CD/DVD drives). This dependency on another computer to perform common computing functions does seem to offset the advantage of increased portability achieved by removing the optic drive. An external super-drive can be added at extra cost ($99) but the need to connect this peripheral undermines the MacBook Air's sleek appeal and adds weight to the overall package you need to carry with you.

That gorgeous exterior is hiding another problem. In order to keep her trimmer lines the space available for the hard drive has been severely limited, restricting the MacBook Air to the 1.8-inch hard drives similar to those found in the 80 GB iPod which run at 4200 rpm, instead of the faster and more powerful larger drives available in the MacBook Pro which

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