With Easter weekend last week and my hectic travel schedule I haven’t had time to write about it yet, but yes, I picked up one of Apple’s new MacBook Air laptops (are you honestly surprised? ). I’ll spare you the rundown of the feature set this ultraportable laptop comes packing with — since posts on this topic are literally a dime a dozen — and relay some of my first impressions and some unboxing photos.

First impression, obviously, the weight. There isn’t anything like it — even non-geeks are WOWed. Secondly, the keyboard, ever since I got my first MacBook last year I’ve always been envious of the MacBook Pro’s backlight keyboard, now I too can enjoy.

I went with the lower end model, the 1.6 Ghz processor with an 80 GB hard drive. Although to be fair this machine is by no means a low-end laptop, even given its hardware limitations. Of course I would have liked the solid-state disk 64 GB hard drive, but I simply could not justify spending an extra $1000 on something that will be obsolete in the not too distant future. My plan is to wait until SSD storage capacity increases and price decreases, at which point I’ll pick one up and swap it out myself.

The only real annoyance I’ve experienced so far is some trouble with getting remote disk to work. Since I’ll be using this as a traveling laptop for work I am unfortunately stuck with having to run Windows applications on it. When I purchased the MacBook Air I also bought VMware Fusion alongside it in addition to the Ethernet dongle (which I have yet to use this first week).

I tried installing VMware over remote disc in the hotel this week but with no luck. I figured there were just complications using remote disc on a Wi-Fi network with hundreds of people on it, come to find out the hotel was having wireless switch issues, so who knows. What I do know, though, is that I could not get it to work on a Windows XP laptop this morning back at home. I decided to give it a whirl on the MacBook, and after a little tinkering and rebooting I was finally able to install VMware on the MacBook Air via remote disc (review to come in a future post).

Once VMware was on there it was a breeze to install Windows XP SP 2 — from the .iso disk image — as well as Office 2003 and Visio. It’s certainly not as fast as a MacBook Pro, but that’s not the purpose of this machine.

You can definitely expect some follow-up posts on this, time permitting of course. In the meantime feel free to drop me any questions you may have about it in the comments, and here are some unboxing photos for your enjoyment.

1) Unopened

2) top cover off

3) ultra thin

4) accessories

5) pre-first boot

6) bienvenue

7) migration assistant

For the record I have yet to try out the Migration Assistant feature. I opted to forego it during setup and haven’t had a chance to use it to transfer all my iPhone stuff over to the MacBook Air, will let you know how it goes. And finally, last thing I promise….the wireless is fassst!