Got the MacBook Air

I received lots of advice from blog readers, friends, and colleagues at Amazon about the choice of a new laptop, and the general consensus was:

  1. The MacBook Air is the way to go, unless you’re doing serious video work or game-playing.
  2. Getting iTunes set up on a network drive is a royal pain, but it’s doable.

So last night I went over to the Apple store in Bellevue, and bought a MacBook Air, plus a 1TB Time Capsule and a few accessories (like a spare power adapter). I didn’t get an external DVD/CD, figuring that I could use my PowerBook as a remote drive. After all, the PowerBook seemed to have given up its bad habits, and hadn’t failed in weeks…
When I got home, I unpacked the MBA and went online. When I was sure that it was working well, I went to set up the PowerBook as a remote drive. During this process, I had to reboot the PowerBook… and it never came back. I went through all the variations, resetting the PMU and powering up with battery but no power, power but no battery, and both power and battery. Nothing worked. I left it overnight, tried again this morning, and it still won’t start. So it looks as if I can finally take it in to be fixed under AppleCare.
Recovering my files from the PowerBook shouldn’t be an issue: I have a full Time Machine backup on a USB drive. One minor annoyance is that the MBA installation CD is still in the PowerBook, so I can’t use it to set up another computer as a remote drive! (Remember when CD drives used to have eject buttons?) It’s not urgent, but I want to install the copy of iWork that I bought.
I haven’t set up the Time Capsule yet; that’s a weekend project. Do I set up a new 802.11n network, or simply extend my existing 802.11g one? Would I actually get “n” speeds, anyway: what do my other devices (Nintendo Wii, iPhone, OLPC XO, PSP) use? Does the Time Capsule go in the living room, next to the cable modem? If so, I can’t use it to provide network access to my printer. Details, details.
Meanwhile, the MBA is gorgeous. This is the first LED-lit screen I’ve used, and the clarity and uniformity are outstanding. One thing that I didn’t expect is that the keyboard feels much crisper than my work-supplied “Black Beauty” MacBook.