The article underplayed the importance of thermal design envelope to the situation, and your summary completely left it out. I think that many people- especial

The article underplayed the importance of thermal design envelope to the situation, and your summary completely left it out. I think that many people- especially consumers who know enough to reach the wrong conlcusions- don't understand the impact and importance of dealing with heat from CPUs and GPUS. IF you look closely at the inside-the-case view of the Air, you'll notice that the motherboard is at one level, in a plane with the keyboard, and then above it (toward the camera) is space that exists over the CPU board but not over the batteries (because this is where the case gets thicker). On the left, this extra space is taken up with an SSD card that is attached on top of the motherboard... on the right, it is taken up with a heat-pipe that hits the CPU and GPU and goes to the fan. See how much space the fan takes with the heat pipe? The heat pipe alone doubles the thickness of the machine (assuming some battery space could be given up to fit the SSD in elsewhere.) But you can't go without it and you can't put it in plane with the motherboard. Laptops are all about power, heat and heat management.