I'll elaborate for him.
Two different devices, two different needs.
One touchscreen, one not.
Totally different apps.
Frankly, most people will still get an ipad, this new Air didnt kill anything, not even the ipad, slow your roll
That's too simplistic. The air will eat a share from the ipad, but the air will eat a share from netbooks/pc laptops too, so it's win/win for apple, and an almost sure death of netbooks at least on this side of the fence which is getting bigger and bigger.
In typical Jobsian genius (and experience) mode, the ipad was given a good few months for people to get to know it, to use it, to understand it's purpose, to let it in their lives and need it. Remember after it was announced the vast majority here in full blown ignorance and with lack of foresight had pretty negative things to say about the ipad, with the thing you heard the most being, I dont get it, or what is it for, or it's just a big ipod touch and all the crap (let alone what the pc side was saying...). What some retrospectively consider as a simple division between tablet and laptop is an anachronism, because that distinction simply wasn't there yet. People didn't know what a modern touch table was and why they would ever consider it over a laptop.
So apple had to have a strategy. At that point during the launch of the ipad, no other mac star could outshine it or come even remotely close at doing what it does. Because it had to find its market, it had to be given time for people to get to know it. Steve wasn't going to kill his baby, the very same baby he put on life support so he could make a phone because he saw the market was there first, so he could built a customer base, make an app store, get them to learn touch, get all the developers on board etc. etc. He wasn't going to kill it by releasing a mac as thin and light that people who had never used an ipad might prefer, not after years of preparing, and aborting, and preparing again, and then aborting the ipad.
But he had a back up plan, as he said when the ipad was launched, "you are alway confident about a product, but you still don't really know, you still get butterflies", if for some reason, even that 2% chance the world wasn't ready for the ipad (which along with Steve I never believed either - I too thought the time had come), and the ipad sold merely adequately but nothing to write home about, we would still have given it time to go into people's hands, and then he would have fired up with the smallest portable mac ever in the air.
THAT'S WHY the air was delayed. A masterful planning move from Steve. Such little details show why this guy (and the great team he has around him, let's not forget) is special. These little details that even his largest competitors can't grasp, let alone implement.
As an aside, I was browsing the toshiba website today just to have some price comparison with the new air from a pc side: a. the air is a very, very good deal, no one can match it with this level of quality. b. these guys at toshi still don't get it. they used to be great, I owned their laptops way back when. And now I go to their site and after having to shift through literally tens of choices (from the side panel) of cpus, screen sizes, hd sizes blah blah, and a 50+ or so laptops, I say to myself, ... that, I can't be bothered to plough through every conceivable combination of hardware (almost all running windows) because these guys still haven't managed to understand the very basics of streamlining their products (as Steve has showed them years ago). That's why they are reduced to making chips for apple instead of being the ones who make the products people talk about. When will they learn? Possibly never.
sorry for the big digression.
