The MacBook Air has landed! Reviews take off!

Now that the MacBook Air is starting to arrive in stores, the reviews are starting to emerge. On balance, they all love the MacBook Air - with reservations. Here's a selection, in no particular order:

Although engadget.com thinks the MacBook Air is 'the slowest Apple machine on the block', Ryan Block's extensive review, complete with lavish gallery of MacBook Air photos, puts things in perspective. He concludes:

While not all Mac users are going to stand in line to get this latest machine, Apple is doubtless welcomed back into the ultraportable laptop market by the technology world. Perhaps the largest side-effect of the Air won't be ditching optical drives, though; for the rest of Apple's consumer base it's now just a matter of time before other Mac laptop lines benefit from the technical and engineering advances that made this thing so thin and light. Give us the lovechild of the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro, and it's all over.

Ryan's review provoked six pages of comment. Read it here.

Over at cnet reviews, they give the MacBook Air a 7.7/10 rating (very good) although 47 users there only gave it 5.4/10 (average). Dan Ackerman's review pits the MacBook Air against the Sony Vaio TZ150, the Toshiba Portege R500 and a MacBook Core 2 Duo 13.3 inches (2.2GHz). The Air comes in second behind... the MacBook! Cnet's summary:

The good: Incredibly thin yet surprisingly sturdy; new trackpad gesture controls are very useful; remote optical drive makes living without a built-in drive much easier.

The bad: Very limited connectivity; slower than other MacBooks; SSD hard-drive option is ridiculously expensive and standard hard drive is small; battery is not user replaceable.

The bottom line: The design is revolutionary, but Apple's MacBook Air will appeal to a smaller, more specialized audience than the standard MacBook, thanks to a stripped-down set of connections and features.

Read cnet's full review here.

At gizmodo, Brian Lam confesses:

The MacBook Air is driving me insane. I want it like no other hardware. It's thin, yeah, ok, we know this. And many power users have been bitching for more: 3G, bigger storage, more USB ports, and an internal drive. If you feel that way, this computer isn't for you. I'll go ahead and call it the most simple, focused, and beautiful laptop ever. And the MacBook Air's shortcomings matter no more than the discomfort that fashionistas endure while wearing high heels, or car fanatics do when they have to fill up their tanks twice a week in their 5MPG sports cars. It just doesn't matter to those who are smitten. For the rest of you, here are the facts.

Brian concludes that while the MacBook Air would never be his main machine he finds himself 'every day more and more unable to resist buying one of these first, and figuring out where it fits into my life second'. Brian's review elicited 101 comments. Read it here.

That's enough reviews for now.

The MacBook Air stripped bare: ifixit.com, the site every MacBook tinkerer loves, has done its thing and provided a detailed illustrated guide to stripping the MacBook Air down to "88 screws and lots of parts." See them all here.