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MacBook Air is .76 inches at its thickest point.

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The Air packs a full-size keyboard and generous 13.3-inch screen.

When I first saw the MacBook Air – the new ultraportable laptop from Apple – I was wowed by its razor-thin design, but skeptical about its lack of features found on some other travel laptops. There's no CD or DVD drive, no Ethernet port, no removable battery and only one USB port.

Depending on your needs and habits, those drawbacks may be deal breakers. But the MacBook Air is so sleek and elegant that pulling it out of your bag and using it is as easy and seamless as taking a small notebook from your pocket. I wanted to bring it everywhere, even to places that I wouldn't normally think of bringing a computer, such as meetings, the cafeteria, or dare I say, the bathroom.

The first thing you notice about the Air is how thin it is. At 0.16 of an inch at its thinnest point and 0.76 of an inch at its thickest point, Apple says the Air is the world's thinnest notebook.

It weighs 3 pounds, has an 80 GB hard drive, two GB of memory, a built-in Webcam, and it costs $1,800. For an astonishing $3,100, you can get a MacBook Air that has less storage space – 64GB – but comes with a solid state drive, which has no moving parts, so it's faster and more durable.

It's a pleasure to sit with the Air on your lap while watching TV on the couch, listening to a speech at a conference or riding in the car. In fact, I wrote much of this column on the Air while riding in a car at night. It doesn't get as hot as other laptops and it's very quiet. You can hold it with one hand when it's open or closed.

Once you get over your initial fear of breaking it, you'll discover the Air is pretty sturdy.

The Air packs a full-size keyboard with raised black keys and a generous 13.3-inch screen. The keyboard is backlit and it automatically lights up when the computer detects that the ambient lighting has gone down.

One of the best parts of the MacBook Air is the touchpad, which incorporates the multi-touch gesture control of the iPhone. Pinching the touchpad lets you adjust the text size of a Web page or zoom in and out of a photo. Swiping with three fingers lets you easily browse through pictures. You can tap on the touchpad once to click or twice to be able to select and drag an item. It did take some time to get used to some of the more advanced gesture controls.

To pack so many great features into such a slim body, Apple had to make some significant compromises. For each of these issues, Apple has a solution or workaround which often involves buying more Apple products. For instance, your main options for watching movies are buying them on iTunes or buying an external CD/DVD drive for $100.

The most innovative workaround is a new technology called "Remote Disc," which allows you to use the CD or DVD drive of another computer on the same network to remotely install software on your MacBook Air. Remote Disc works with both Macs and PCs, but I was only able to get it to work with another Mac. One disappointment is that you can't use Remote Disc to import songs from a CD into your iTunes library.

There's no Ethernet port, but if you need a hard-wired connection, you can buy a USB Ethernet adapter for $30. Since many hotels still only offer wired Internet access, it would be nice if Apple included the Ethernet adapter for free.

Like the iPod and iPhone, the Air lacks a removable battery. This might be a problem if you are on a transcontinental flight or are away from an outlet for a long time. Apple claims the MacBook Air has up to five hours of battery life, but I only got about 3 hours in my tests.

My biggest complaint is that there is only one USB port and it's a port that is built in such a way that makes it incompatible with certain products. Since a little door flips down to reveal the USB port, earphone jack and external-display connection, my Sprint aircard would not fit because part of the edge of the computer blocked it from...