Winter Lurgi prevented me making it to BBC TV's White City centre in London, where journalists watched an Apple skycast of Steve Jobs's celebrity sales pitch for the new MacBook Air (see also below).

My first impressions, purely from the pictures and spec, are that it looks a beautiful machine, but not stunningly more so than slimline notebooks already on the market. Most interesting is the fact that it responds to the same “pinch, rotate and swipe” gestures used in the iPod Touch, a genuine (as opposed to steve-jobsian) innovation.

But the launch was still anti-climactic. I was hoping Apple would release its first true portable – a machine light and small enough to carry around by choice rather than need. This is a format crying out for new ideas, especially about the interface – the kind of thing Apple is good at. Let’s hope that like other companies in this field it is waiting for the next generation of energy-efficient processors.

Sorry to harp on about the Eee PC. It's flawed and clumsy and antique looking. It is chunkier than the MacBook Air, though probably smaller in volume and certainly easier to carry. It is an open system not primed to feed Apple's online cash cows. The battery can simply be unclipped, whereas a replacement on the Air needs serious surgery. And it has a proper network port, and so does not need to rely on flaky Wifi shouting its data through the overcrowed airwaves. On price, novelty and potential it is by far the most interesting of recent machines, MacBook Air and all.