I do know that I've used PCs for longer than Macs in my life. The average life span of my PCs are around 2 years. Macs...none have ever broke. The oldest one is 5 years.
My now venerable 12 year old desktop PC is still chugging along. I've swapped the case (full tower back in the days was taking up way too much space).
It's seen a few upgrades and side grades over the years, but it's still the same PC it was. Of course these days it's not a Linux desktop anymore, it's a FreeBSD server, sitting in the basement instead of under my desk.
I'm gonna be sad the day I retire it. But then I'll look at the brand new 6 core AMD machine with 8 GB RAM that'll replace it as a server and be happy again. Now to find money to finance this upgrade...
Oh, I have a now 17 year old Sun Ultra 5 workstation laying around too. It was an active Solaris 9 machine until last year, still humming along on all its original hardware too without even a bearing noise. It's so old, the PCI slots won't even accept newer network cards sold these days.
Apple is not the only vendor that makes reliable hardware that lasts.
The 13" model is priced poorly as you can get a 13" MBP, it doesn't seem to make sense to spend more and get less cpu, less storage, less maximum ram (4gb vs. 8gb), less upgradable options.
Less cpu doesn't matter these days. There's hardly anything the MBA 1.86 GHZ won't do efficiently enough to be tolerable. This includes photoshop, illustrator, and other higher end software packages. People cling on to Macs much older with much slower processors and don't really have a problem.
Less storage ? Who cares. The days of desktop/laptop based storage are dead (or at the very least should be). It's not reliable, especially in a mobile package. NAS are it. Your data is available on all computers without having to have a single one on all the time (only have the NAS on and plugged into the network) and most NAS can offer disk redundancy for high availability of said data.
RAM ? 4GB is plenty though 8GB might be nice moving forward. There's no question that when we do get to the point where 4 GB is a struggle, the Air will be capable of having more.
The MBA is very much a main computer for a lot of people. Mac Pro type workstations are only required for a very limited number of creative professionals that do push the boundaries of sound editing or graphics design/work. I can bet you a lot of the Mac Pro owners here own them for the sake owning a Mac Pro, not to fill any kind of real need.
