450 karma · joined February 3, 2011
?!? I'm using the Android browser!
When the first-gen 13.3" MacBook Air first came out, I had just bought an 8.9" EeePC 901. The difference between an 8.9" screen and a 13.3" screen felt enormous---especially given that 7" EeePCs were still being manufactured at the time, and the 10" models were still in the future.
The whole appeal of the EeePC to me (and others I know) was its extreme portability. The guy who sat next to me at work had a 15" Vaio. It was so big it needed a special bag. Because of it, sometimes he just wouldn't bother to bring it to work. Inevitably, sometime during the day he would find something he wanted to do on the computer. With the EeePC, it was so small that I could just slip it into its slipcase, throw it in my bag and take it anywhere, "just in case", even when it was extremely unlikely that I'd end up using it. I was rarely without it.
13.3" is so close to 15" that it hardly makes a difference. It seems unlikely that you would/could just throw it in your bag and take it anywhere. Even if it was light, it was also big. I took it as a lightweight laptop, not a netbook competitor, and in fact that's how Apple seemed to me to have marketed it---it was the reviewers who were comparing it to netbooks. Maybe it was the reviewers who convinced Apple to try to take on the netbook market with the 11", but it seems to me that wasn't Apple's original plan at all.
Over the years, I've taken stabs at German, Latin, Chinese, Spanish and Lojban. Same story each time---a few weeks of initial enthusiasm, and then I got bored and never returned to Language X. I don't know what kept me glued to Japanese. With Esperanto, I was about to move on when I discovered there were actually people in my town who spoke it and met every week. It added unexpected depth to what I had been approaching as a novelty language.
EDIT: Wow, I need to have my memory checked. I must have been confused by the $1700 price tag into thinking there was a 17" MacBook Air. I do distinctly remember being baffled by reviewers comparing the first Airs to the EeePC, though, as it seemed to me they weren't even aiming at the same markets.