The MacBook Air is without doubt a beautiful machine, but a lot of its appeal derives from a canny visual trick: gradually beveled edges. It looks a lot thinner than other ultraportables, but there isn't much difference. The back of the laptop is 0.76" thick, the front after the beveling a quarter inch less.

The screen is actually big enough that the laptop doesn't look small. When the screen stretches 13", as it does with the MacBook Air, you'd want a paper-thin body. But this body is just beveled more subtly. IMO subnotebooks like the Asus Eee look sexier because they're absolutely tiny. (That's not to claim their fit 'n finish is as pretty.)

The MacBook Air's screen is highly reflective, which is painful when you're near a window. Apple doesn't offer a matte screen for this model. The machine's keyboard is chiclet style, and low-profile with little travel and an unsatisfying feel. On CPU, the laptop is pretty but expensive and gutless, like an early PT Cruiser or Mazda Miata.

Buying upgrades from Apple is like getting your car serviced at the dealer: expect a steep markup. On the Air, you pay $300 for a minor CPU speed bump from 1.6 to 1.8 GHz. That's the cost of a whole new Asus Eee subnotebook, a complete 3.0 GHz processor, a 1.5 terabyte hard disk and so on.

The iPhone is as much a letdown for this longtime Apple fan as the man hands of Seinfeld's hot date. I was primed to love this shiny precious, to gently nudge its ovoid edges into my technological nest. I even switched mobile phone companies and, on the weekend of the iPhone's release, trooped down to the Apple store to see my baby-to-be.

What I saw quenched my affection. The iPhone's design is a triumph of flashiness over usability. At every point, the designers chose chrome over day-to-day use. I can understand why they did it: to create sexy demos and to justify the iPhone's stratospheric price. But sheer lickability won't sate your appetite.

The iPhone's keyboard-free design is useless for high-speed typing. Forget about using your thumbs. Even hunt 'n peck with the on-screen keyboard takes spellcheck on steroids just to get you to George Bush fluency. Trusting AutoCorrect is like trusting your airbags: they're supposed to be a last resort.

Those claiming to have reached 100% accuracy on the iPhone's virtual keyboard are either yoga masters or liars. At best, your email will look like it was typed by a mentally-challenged gerbil. And that is nit wjat yiu wsnt. (Sent from my iPhone.)

Then there's Steve Jobs' jihad against labels. One of the top iPod support issues was reportedly how to turn it on. Not only is the iPhone's power button not labeled, neither is the silent mode switch. They're just baffling little strips of smug black plastic floating in a silver sea, thinner and more stylish than you'll ever be.

The phone doesn't start with the numeric keypad you expect. Instead, it begins in a dashboard cluttered with sixteen garish, full-color icons advertising useless functions like weather. If you're walking around with your mobile phone, you probably already know whether it's raining.

What you really want is to get to your friends' phone numbers. But the iFlash foils you again: you can't jump to 'Steve' by typing the first two letters of his name. Instead, you have to go to your S's and then scroll through all of them by flicking. The same is true when setting an appointment in the future. You can't just choose the next year; instead you have to rotate what looks like slot machine wheels, one month at a time. This is apparatchik, not iChic.

The iPhone's wide-screen Web browser promises great things. But it loads Web sites with an illegible thumbnail. Tap on an article, and you're dumped again into a 50,000-foot snapshot rather than the text of the story. It takes four taps - browser, zoom, story, zoom - to accomplish anything useful.

The ad campaign for the iPhone makes much of its pinch and open gestures for zooming. But in real life, they're sloppy and prone to triggering nearby hyperlinks. As I tried zooming in on an online map, the mushiness of the pinch left me longing for a plain old slider.

The much-hyped Cover Flow feature, a slick way to scroll through album art, is pointless and undiscoverable. It's pointless because, as Apple's own iTunes has proven, music buyers now think of music as tracks rather than albums. It's undiscoverable because to start this feature, you enter music mode, scratch your head, read the manual, and then turn the iPhone 90 degrees on its side. Trust Apple to design a feature so non-intuitive, it makes a Moroccan souk look friendly.

The iPhone designers deserve kudos for reimagining the smart phone for those handicapped by loss of stylus. We smartphone users roam our cities substituting a finger for a point, a pose much in vogue when commenting on blogs. We are the walking wounded, and we are everywhere. But you can't select text precisely with the stub of your meaty finger, and thus the iPhone omits even cut 'n paste. In the pursuit of gloss, Apple has pared actual usefulness to the cuticle.

The first attempt at an iPhone is as over-ambitious as Apple's earlier flop, the Newton. It's the second coming of the Jesus phone which I await.