As someone who travels a lot and hates large laptops, and with an other half who both has one of the world’s greatest aversions to checking in baggage as she zips through airports and has a history of choosing laptops on the basis of whether or not they will fit in an oversized handbag, I appreciate the new form factor.

As for the compromises they made to get there: well, the hard disk is small, but this is not a desktop-replacement machine, but a desktop-complimenting machine, even if Apple’s recent patent for something more exiting comes to nothing.

I was surprised to see that there is no ethernet port – ethernet joins modems in this brave new world in becoming a USB dongle (optional). Still, five minutes thought reassured me that this, too, was the right choice. In all the settings I am likely to use a laptop like this, connectivity either doesn’t exist or is provided almost exclusively by wireless. This will only increase to be the case in the future – wireless (whatever the limits or disadvantages of the technology) is much cheaper to deploy. If I am carrying an ethernet cable, the dongle is a minor addition. As for home use, well, it makes little odds whether I am plugging in a USB cable or a USB cable with modem.

Speaking of USB, the single USB port is a surprise, but again probably a compromise worth making for a laptop that will fit into an envelope but which still packs a full-size keyboard. In the setting where I want to plug in lots of devices (at home), a USB hub might quickly become a de-facto docking station. On the road, as it were, the single port is unlikely to be a real problem.

The lack of an optical drive is no real surprise (for 90% of the time my laptop’s one is dead weight), though watching Apple roll out their next OS upgrade to such users will be interesting. There are, still many large software packages that are not shipped in download-able form. Apple will sell a USB DVD drive to you at extra cost, of course, and have included software that well let you ‘share’ the drive of another computer in what (from the videos) looks like a typically (for Apple) painless fashion.

I am less convinced, though, by the idea that we all want to give up our DVD collections in favour of ‘renting’ poorer quality content from Apple. Let’s be clear that it lacks a DVD drive because that is a compromise worth making in an ultra-portable machine, not because the DVD is even close to retirement – which brings me to discussing what this machine is not. This is not a desktop replacement, and sits poorly against even its junior sibling as a real replacement for anyone’s ‘main’ computer. In fact, unless you are going to buy an external DVD drive and probably some kind of external hard drive too, this machine is a parasite (though a benign one) on your more capable machines.

The processors are fast enough, but are still going to be sluggish running all the snazzier features of Leopard. More seriously, the Hard Disk, at a maximum of 80 gigs (or an expensive SSD 65 gigs) is plenty for word processing and work on the go, isn’t going to store your family photographs, your music collection, the podcasts you are creating, or the ever-growing collection of large files needed for work. Of course, on your home network, Jobs is ready with a partial solution, but nothing beats properly-sized internal hard drive.

Still, unless it has some unfortunate flaw, like a case that gets far too hot (and the aluminium does not inspire confidence given the Macbook Pro experience), this machine is a winner. It is for people who don’t pack the kitchen sink on the basis that they just might need it and are prepared to travel light. For them it is perfect – at least until they can get back home.

Oh, this is my first post in quite a while. Is anyone still out there?

He made much of the fact that games are being ported to OS X. Now it seems as if what he meant was that some Windows games will be released running under some kind of emulation. Not exactly the same thing, really, or nearly as significant. It is, for one thing, hardly new.

Then he made much of the fact that developers would be able to write “Web 2.0″ applications for the iPhone. It wasn’t, he said, full access to the phone (which is what developers wanted), but it would enable programmers to write software that integrated well with phone functions. It was a way of allowing development that Apple had thought long and hard about.

But re-watching the video and really reading the fine print, it looks as this too was an effort in spin. A web-browser had already been announced, so the ability to use web applications was hardly new. Jobs avoided promising that ‘web applications’ could be downloaded onto the phone, meaning that third-party applications will only run when an internet connection is available. It is noticeable that within the demo, the application show was accessed via Safari, not via its own icon. And ‘access to the phone features’, such as sending email or making a call, does not seem to mean ‘tell the phone to send data’ but rather ‘launch Apple’s own email program when you click on an email address’.

We’re not even talking, then, about ‘widgets’ in the OS X sense – mini web pages that appear to the user to be individual applications; we’re talking about viewing web pages on a web browser. If they’ve thought long and hard, then, they haven’t come up with anything new.

Jobs had some of the most important members of Apple’s developer community in one room, and then tried to impress them with not one but two rather misleading announcements. I am not an expert, but that doesn’t seem like a very smart move to me.

All of this misses the real point, I suspect. Apple has announced that it will allow limited development of third-party applications for the forthcoming iPhone. Developers will be allowed to develop “web” applications that run within the Safari web-browser.

Allowing Windows users a version of Safari gives them the pseudo-SDK needed for iPhone application development. If Apple manages to persuade a few Windows users to use their browser, then so much the better – it will certainly get the Apple fans cheering, but a futile attempt to re-open and win the “Browser Wars” is hardly worth developer-time.

While we are on the subject of yesterday’s keynote address at the Apple developer conference – my personal UI peeves are needless transparency (why make my eyes work hard?), icons that look very similar except for subtle, artistic differences, and file managers that display previews of files instead of icons.[1] Leopard looks set to deliver all three. Terrific.

[1] The latter has been attempted by every major operating system, and everyone can get it to work well for demos and poorly in the real world. It looks good in a folder of very different documents, but in a folder of letters that all look very much the same at 20x20px, it simply sucks up computer resources without providing any utility at all.

The fee for the software is required in order for Apple to comply with generally accepted accounting principles for revenue recognition, which generally require that we charge for significant feature enhancements, such as 802.11n, when added to previously purchased products.

There is more coverage of the reason for this at the Register: blame legal changes in the wake of the Enron scandal.

If this interpretation holds true, does this mean the end of free software upgrades?

Poor, but at least the customer service people are good.

Of course, in this case, they’ve actually had not announce it themselves early, because regulation and co-operation with other businesses makes it impossible to maintain control any longer.