Would it, perhaps, be an idea for MBA owners to create a small partition and clone their install discs to it? That would eliminate the need for an optical drive, no? Am I missing something here?

That could work, but it kind of goes against Apples design philosophy. They like everything to be simple as pie. I'm curious as to how this will work out...

That would be terrible waste of space on your smallish 80GB drive.

Yes, or, even worse, on your 64Gb SSD.

I would like to see a boot comparison between the HDD and SSD versions. Has any review done that yet?

Don't know if anyones seen this, but I think it's worth a read.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=415459

Agreed, SilverDreamer; there are definitely good points made in that post.

For Apple, the PR value of the AirBook alone is mind boggling. This will help ensure that Apple is top-of-mind (or pretty darned close to it) for vast numbers of laptop purchasers in the years to come.

-- ArcticStones

Good news for those of you with thick wallets:
Apple may well offer a configuration that doubles that, before summer arrives. :)

I would think that worth waiting for. 64Gb is really awkward these days. I went through some of my folders, fleecing out old and unnecessary files and saved a whole 900Mb.

128Gb would be quite user-friendly for me. An article on Appleinsider suggests that the user could replace the SSD themselves, when larger capacities become available???

Even if not quite feasible now, it won't be long before flash drives will have high enough capacity and low enough cost to replace optical discs for non-archiving purposes.

I would not be surprised to see Apple release OS X on a USB flash ROM drive.

I would, that goes against them locking you into their product, running it only on their hardware and think secret. I think you will see a PC version of OS X before that.

They are just now allowing for virtual servers, just now while others have been doing it for years. They still won't even allow a virtual desktop OS. Apple is behind the market in this aspect.

I'm awful confused as to how any of this has to do with putting OSX on a flash drive. Are you inferring that since other computers can read flash drives that Apple won't release OSX on a flash drive? Because other computers read DVD's and CD's, and that never stopped Apple... I must be confused, would you mind explaining?

indeed. where do we go from here then?

I have to second Zalister's question. I, too, fail to see how putting OS X on a USB flash ROM drive is any different from putting it on a DVD ROM, except that it requires only a USB port instead of a DVD drive.

I think it has to do with security. Technically, a flash ROM wouldn't be any less secure than a DVD/CD, but it would be a whole lot faster.

I know I avoid booting from the installer disk whenever possible because it's so slow. Lack of speed just makes it more difficult than I want it to be, and I don't think I'm alone.

If you put the OS on a flash ROM, you make it just a little easier to hack it to work on non-Apple hardware. Not much easier, I know. But every little bit counts, especially when you no longer have to wait to try your next attempt. ;)

Apple would have to for one enable USB booting, and two opens up a door for any hacker community to exploit that to make a mobile version of OS X that can run on any x86 machine.

Considering how slow they are with the virtual machine market because of the same reasons, i don't see them doing this. I am not against it and would welcome it, but Steve is very short sighted when it comes to these things and probably won't allow Apple to do it.

All PCs support USB booting, where as not every PC can boot an OS X DVD. It is very easy to modify files on a USB flash drive, not so easy on a DVD, and the process is a lot longer. You need to copy to the HD as an image, rip it, modify it, compress it back to the image, reburn it, hope it works. Does that explain what I was trying to say?

I guess I just don't understand why it is easier to rip/modify one ROM compared to another ROM.

Well, why doesn't apple support USB booting? Every other PC manufacturer does. There is no reason not to, unless Steve thinks it could be a threat to their product.

I stumbled across a test from some tech website (sorry, forget exactly where) that got a hold of a 32 GB SSD and stuck it in a PowerBook and some Dell laptop. For some reason, the PowerBook took about the same amount of time to boot, while the Dell's boot time was almost cut in half!

Perhaps Apple already optimized the hell out of OS X's startup process, so an SSD doesn't really make it start faster? Probably other tasks would see a speed increase, such as large program start times (Photoshop?), or just some plain old file copying?

It seems people are jumping on the "MacBook Air Sucks" bandwagon, and are complaining about the most trivial of things:

"MacBook Air's Leopard Installer Disc Incompatible With Other Macs, Apple Warns"
http://www.informationweek.com/news/...leID=206100409

Well, duh! This has been the same with all other models of Macs.

This is highly subjective and goes on course with what you consider to be "booted". Apple's OS by design kind of gives more of the illusion of booting rather than actually being fully booted. To explain this in a simple manner this is how it works. Power > POST > EFI (OF for PPCs) > launchd > loginwindow > desktop

Now, when you see that progress bar move when you boot OS X, it really doesn't represent anything other than launchd starting up. Then launchd brings all processes up that need to be running by a priority. It gets you into the OS and to the desktop as fast as possible to give you the illusion of a fast boot time, when in fact launchd is still launching items in the background for many seconds after you are in your desktop. Try cold booting and then running an application like CS3 right at start up. You will notice its not as snappy or as fast if you launch it say, 1 minute after you are at your desktop. That is because the machine does not have all processes running, only the needed ones.

So, depending on how you are timing boot time depends on results. I am not saying I disapprove of Apple's method, but I think that people tend to leave that out when comparing it to another OS, and I do try to be unbiased about technology, and not a fan boy of any OS. I like and hate them all, haha.