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I love my MacBook Air.  To everyone who asks, I rave that it's my favorite of all the computers I've owned.  Sleek, light, ultraportrable, yet a workhorse with a full-sized keyboard and screen and plenty of memory for my cloud-computing tendencies.

The original knock on the Air, back when it was introduced, was the lack of a disc media drive.  I bought an external drive with the machine, but I can count on one hand the number of times I've used it in three years.  It makes no sense to carry a heavy drive every day when you might need it once a month to install software -- and with downloadable software the new norm, that's a level of use that few people will ever reach.

My original Air is a little more than three years old now.  It's served me well.  But it's showing signs of age -- increasing slowness, the spinning beach ball, a lot of force-quitting needed.  I'm inclined to think it could be rehabilitated, slimmed down, retrofitted for a different purpose, and live another several years.  My few tentative steps in that direction have made some difference, but I still have trouble playing video and keeping high-demand applications (like Twitter clients) open.

And Apple has introduced the next generation Air, which features a solid-state hard drive standard.  It was an option on the first generation, but I didn't get it.  I prefer iPad-style flash memory storage -- no moving parts to wear out.

It may not be the right time to replace my Air in terms of getting a closeout deal of some kind.  And I don't have any urgent need for a new machine for any particular projects or functions upcoming.  (Well, except for my movie-clip-laden orientation talk to the new freshmen in early June.)  But every time I have to shut down and restart to get my applications to run smoothly, or sit through long delays between mouse clicks registering, I start dreaming about a new dream machine -- and feel a little guilty about the love I'm leaving behind.