BTW, even though it shows only -4 on my posts, I've lost far more than 12 points of karma. PG appears to actually be counting the downvotes these days even if he's only showing -4. I think I just bled away about 25 points last night because people can't accept that an 11" notebook with an SSD and no optical drive is a netbook.
Oh no, I lost that karma way before I whined about it. I knew as soon as I posted that it's just a karma burning exercise. Any contrary (or slightly contrary) post in a discussion about Apple is pretty much treated like leprosy. I know that going in. I was just observing that the algorithm appears to have changed and now downvotes are all counted regardless of what the displayed score is.
You didn't lose all of it before you whined. I know that because I downvoted your whine about being downvoted, and didn't downvote your bah-it's-just-a-netbook comments.
(I have a policy of always downvoting whines about being downvoted and "I know I'll be downvoted for this ..." comments and so forth, because (1) they're boring and (2) I have a nasty suspicion that they produce net-positive results for their authors and want to make them not do so.)
Netbook generally isn't about form factor, it's about use factor. A netbook is made for lightweight browsing, emailing, IM'ing, etc. You know, stuff on the 'net.
The new MBA falls into the class of devices known as ultraportables. It's a full powered machine in a very small form factor/weight factor.
This is an interesting point. I actually use my netbook for lots more than stuff on the net. I pretty much use it as an ultra portable laptop. I don't expect awesome performance for it, but hey, it was $270 so I get what I pay for. It can run some old games on it, I play Sim City 4k on it all the time and it does ok. I can run all of Office on it, do some light photo editing on it, etc.
I've used it in a pinch to replace my desktop when my 5 year old power supply bit the dust. It did "ok".
If you compare it to other ultra-portables, the MBA seems to be competitively priced compared some of the ultra high end stuff.
But you can still get ultraportables for about 1/2 of the MBA with competitive specs.
