Ultraportable? The MacBook Air?
It is just very thin. Not more protable than any other laptop.

If you are a Mac guy, sorry but you got only what Apple gives you.

In othere case there are: OQO, EeePC, and many implementations of UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC).

They all can run Lightroom (under Windows). They are ultraportable, because they have 8"-10" displays. And they are reasonably powerful.

I guess I should have mentioned that I do own and use Windows PCs (when necessary) and I have considered using one of the UMPC devices but I sometimes travel for several months at a time before getting back to my home base and I just can't do that without taking my Macintosh comfort zone with me.

I have not bought a MacBook Air, but I've looked at it in the store fairly extensively, so hopefully some of my observations will be helpful.

If you started using photo editing software on a Powerbook, then the Macbook Air will actually be a significant speed increase for you. It has a dual core processor and that makes an enormous difference in responsiveness over the old PowerBooks. Of course it's not going to be as fast as a MacBook Pro for most tasks, but when flailing through public transport you'll really appreciate the lower weight.

For the smaller PCs, you are not just compromising your operating system, dismal though that is, you are also compromising speed and storage. Those machines are usually using a far less powerful processor, less memory and far less drive capacity. I believe the EEE, for example, uses a 4GB SSD which is probably about the same capacity of a memory card you use regularly on your DSLR.

Furthermore, the tiny keyboard and display don't really make photo editing easy. I've played with small keyboard/screen devices at Best Buy and they are murder to type on for more than a few seconds.

I realized how useful something like the Air could be when I ran through the Taiwan airport with my 17" PowerBook, huffing and puffing. Something like the Air would be of tremendous use in that kind of situation. And it would have been easier to set up on the plane, even in tourist class.

For intensive travel, I suspect the Flash Drive version would be worth the extra money despite the reduced capacity - you would have a device with a much longer life in any kind of tough environment. And wake up from sleep worked just like a giant iPhone - you open the case, it's running. There is a small but significant delay with the hard drive version.

The only real question is how well the weight and size balance out. My feeling is that if you have a backpack now, you can probably find space in it for an Air. Obviously it won't fit in your pocket, but I don't think any computer with an acceptable keyboard or sufficient disk capacity would. The light weight will certainly be an immense advantage, even compared to a 12" PowerBook. In fact, I think the net bulk of the two devices is very similar.

Today's software is much greedier in terms of screen space use than ever before. Even 1024x768 screens are cramped to the point of nearly being unusable for typical graphic applications. I think this is the real reason there is no more 12" PowerBook; it could not accomodate the larger screen sizes needed to use today's software pleasantly.

I think when you squeeze something in your backpack, its bulk is probably more important than its vertical and horizontal size. So it will be easier to fit your Air and easier for you to squeeze other needed items in.

Hope that was of interest; I know it isn't the definitive account you wanted, but I think the Air is sufficiently new that there won't be many yet.

D

I'm a Mac guy, I have a 15" MacBook Pro, after looking at the MacBook Air, I see that it's not that good as a photo platform at all, slow, small screen, and NO ports. I'll stick with my 15" MacBook Pro. For those who have issues with the 17" being too heavy, get in shape!

David - thanks for your input, we seem to be completely on the same page.I also have run through a lot of airports with the 17"PowerBook (plus camera equipment) and I am ready for a change.

Andrew - It is not a matter of exchanging one for the other, just making it easier when on the road. I would not recommend using something like the MacBook Air as your only computer.

My MacBook Air (MBA) runs Lightroom, CS3, and Firefox just fine. I backup the Lightroom Catalogs to my main computer over my wireless network at home, and erase the versions on the MBA to save space. Best of all, the computer, power supply, Leica M8, 4 lenses, in a Timbuk2 bag weigh 10 lbs.

I travel extensively for long periods, shooting a lot of pictures as I go. I own a very small Sony Vaio TX, which is a good bit smaller than the Macbook Air, a little bit lighter at 2.75 lbs, and has a built-in DVD burner. I've run Lightroom on mine for since beta 3, with no problems at all. Obviously I can't carry my whole image library around with me or expect desktop-level performance, but for an average trip of two months and around 3000 images, it's perfectly fast enough. I calibrate the screen before leaving on a trip, and when I get home and load things up on my desktop machine, the images that I've worked on seem to look pretty good.

For me, it's the perfect travel storage device: the disk is big enough for all my images, I can burn DVDs for backups and it runs Lightroom very nicely. I can also back up my images to the iPod that comes with anyway.

Mine was a little more expensive than a Macbook Air, but it's been the perfect machine for all my traveling. I think the Air would have been too big for some of the places we've used the Sony (trains, buses, cars, cramped airline seats) and certainly too big to fit in my bag along with all my other gear. I really love the little Sony, an couldn't be happier with it.

I've done the same research several times, and I've allways got the same conclusion:

Forget the portable drives, buy more CF cards and bring the laptop if you have to do some initial editing in the field.

The only issue is backup when travelling. My solutions is often to make enough space on the laptop, and not delete the CF cards after import -- or use a small portable drive. I seldom take more than 30-40 GB on an assignment/travel before I can backup at my office.

I'm running Lightroom on an Air with 12M RAW out of a Canon 5D and it's fine. I love it, actually. Yes the disk is small and slow on paper, but the overall system is quite snappy and I'm very pleased using Lightroom on it.

My biggest worry was that I'd miss the screen real estate (1280x800 vs. 1440x900), but I've found that I don't miss the extra bits. I also expected to hate the glossy screen for glare reasons, but the Air's screen is just a delight to use. It's much crisper and photos are noticeably sharper. In a way, the Apple Stores don't do their screens justice as there's just so much light in there that it's much worse than real life. You simply don't have that kind of glare in your hotel room.

Whether you can live on 80G is something you have to decide on your own, but portable USB drives are so cheap that I don't view this as a limitation. Throw an extra 200G in your bag if you need to. That's a good tradeoff for me. You can check the drives when you travel, it's not like Asian airlines are going to let you carry a big bag on board anyway.

Also, one of the previous comments sort of implied that instantaneous wake from sleep was associated with having the SSD; it's not. It's instantaneous on the 80G model too. Flip to on in under two seconds.

My two cents on SSD: I'm a geek with experience building hardware system containing embedded flash and flash cards with file systems on them and I wouldn't touch a first generation SSD drive nor will any of my geek friends. It's entirely unclear to me whether the failure modes of SSD drives running generic demand-paged operating systems (like BSD/Unix) are well understood. SSD may be the future, but since we're talking about your data here, I'm personally going to sit out a few generations (and a few more years actual experience) before moving to an SSD.