I was pretty excited when I heard that Apple was releasing a new 12-ish inch laptop.
Back in the day, my 12" Powerbook was a full-featured, state-of-the-art machine crammed into a teeny-tiny lightweight chassis that also happened to have great battery life. I still own one, and use it regularly -- it's an absolutely fantastic, and very capable little machine; arguably the best small laptop ever produced.
5 years later, it's back, and.....the processor has a lower clock speed, there's less built-in storage, fewer ports (no Ethernet!), no optical drive, and the standard amount of RAM is barely sufficient for a modern OS. The battery is only (barely) better, and can't even begin to compete with the truly awesome battery life on the MacBook Pro line.
Yes, I get that it's thinner, lighter, and that the loss of the Firewire port and optical drive are not exactly a dealbreaker today. And although the Core2Duo is indeed a better processor than a G4, it's also not anywhere remotely near state-of-the-art, and 1.4GHz is the slowest-clocked machine I've ever seen to carry that architecture.
Good design is a very big deal in laptops for portability, durability, and usability, which is why I've been buying from Apple for so long. They have virtually no competition in this regard. However, the tech specs keep slipping further and further, and I'm finding it difficult to take Apple seriously as a hardware manufacturer. The 13" Macbook Pro is a beautiful machine, but is similarly anemic in terms of performance and features. I also own a Mac Mini, the current lineup of which is inexcusably overpriced and underpowered. Apple's also gotten into the habit of putting incredibly low memory caps on their machines. The new Airs go up to 4GB, which is adequate for today, but definitely not the future. My 2006 Mac Mini maxes out at 2GB, which is killing the performance of an otherwise great machine.