There are weeks I just want to hop on a plane and return to the valley. This was one of those. Yeah, MacWorld didn’t have the iPhone-mania of last year, but boy do I miss being part of a churning mass of thousands, all lusting after the latest from Cupertino.

And, in some ways, I think this year’s round of goodies was more interesting than the iPhone intro. I mean, iPhone was very sexy, but it wasn’t a statement about the way the world works. And the MacBook Air is.

We have crossed a threshold. The concept of wireless isn’t a feature. It is the way things are. Or they will be in an a few short blinks.

That’s the real message behind Air - and behind the movie rentals as well. We are swimming in the ether 24/7. Wires and cables are so, so, 90s.

And the industrial design … the look and feel of the new device … echoes the message. It is almost ethereal. It floats along, as thin as your fingers, as silvery as a cloud, as light as mist.
It is a creature of the Air, of the wireless data and movies and messages and all the stuff we do without hard connections. As in, pretty much everything.

Do you remember the first computer you bought without an 8 inch drive, without a 5 inch floppy drive, without the 3 inch drive? Optical drives will be more useful artifacts because they are pretty and shiny and make better coasters and art projects than the plastic squares. But they’ll still be artifacts.

In some ways, it is difficult to imagine the world of air. I had a hard time letting go of floppy drives because it was of great comfort to hold them in my hand, and to know that my vital files were lodged there. It wasn’t rational, but it took a long time to warm up to hard drives, all hidden away, untouchable.

And so it is with remote wireless connections. There is something about cradling that DVD in your hands, in seeing “Casablanca” in logotype and in owning the “thing.” In the virtual world, the “thing” becomes virtual too. How can I own Casablanca when it streams to me on demand through my wireless network to my wirelessly connected device?

I can’t bring myself to call this silvern device a “laptop” either. It is a laptop computer for lack of another term, but it isn’t a laptop computer. With its gestural trackpad, its non-removable battery, its unwired world view, its slender form, it is a new sort of hybrid. It’s the alpha version of the science fictional device that we all carry around, a sort of notepad-communicator-media pad. It is going to keep morphing into something that will make the concept of personal computer seem quaint.

A recent study from the The British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee looks at young people’s information behaviour - specifically, at the interactions of those born after 1993. One of the assumptions was that this group was technically adept. The study says this is sort of true - but that the applications tend to be simpler than the assumption holds and that the majority use technology as a basic tool to meet their entertainment, information and social needs.

That is, they USE a digital tool, but they aren’t little IT-geeks. Much as we all drive (aka USE) an automobile but aren’t nascent automobile engineers, the digital generation takes digital data for granted and uses it without much thought about the how behind it.

Which is one more reason why the laptop computer will become increasingly Airy - a device that accesses everything wirelessly because, well, that’s just what happens. That loses the plethora of plugs and options and removable parts and becomes something you just use in the course of day, as naturally and as integrated as a pen and paper.

The iPhone was a product for the world we’ve been interacting with today … but the MacBook Air is a statement for the world we are living in tomorrow. And that would have been worth a westbound flight.