Last May I blogged on a talk by Leonard Sweet on two ways to do more ... better and different. Since that time it's become a standard piece I use when talking about why I approach ministry the way I do, be it downtown, online, or in my writing. While most of Christianity is still caught up in the "better" game, be it a better band, a better choir, better theatrical effects, better liturgy, better marketing, or better whatever else it is that we have done throughout Christendom, I'm grabbing onto the idea of a "different" yet still Biblical ecclesiology (the study the Church itself as a community or organic entity).

So, what does this have to do with Mac? Well, yesterday was the annual keynote address from Steve Jobs at MacWorld and, like any other Apple freak, I was watching the highlights of the address on a live updating site and chatting about the new products with a slew of mostly Mac users from across the country.

I say mostly because, for some reason, a Windows guy decided to drop in on the conversation and repeatedly tell us how great Vista is ... never mind that Bill Gates himself admitted that, even though it was incredibly late on its release, it was still released too early because not all of the bugs had been fixed. Anyway, after the introduction of the Mac Book Air, this guy had to go off on Mac being all about novelty and not really caring about usefulness. According to him, the Air is all style and no substance.

Now, if we're working on a "more as better" model of computing, then he's exactly right. After all, the Air is, in no way, shape, or form designed to be the latest and greatest portable desktop ... after all, it doesn't have an optical drive or firewire port, it's 80 gig hard drive (60 if you go flash) isn't all that impressive, it's not as fast as other computers, and it only has one USB port.

However, if we think of the Air in the "more as different" category, we can begin to see how it's the beginning of a new genre of portable computing, one that I'm already moving towards on my almost 3 year old iBook.

So, what's this genre? The laptop computer as terminal. Now, having a terminal isn't anything new, you can find them in my corporate environments and in places like libraries. What is new however is that the terminal will hook onto the Internet which is where all of your documents and other files will be stored.

For example, I rarely use a word processor on my desktop anymore. Rather, I use Google Docs (I tried Zoho which has more functionality, but I continuously had issues entering text and moving around the page which makes a word processor worthless no matter how many bells and whistles it has). So, if you send me a document in Microsoft Word, since all of my e-mails run through a Google account, I won't download it, I'll just click a button and it will open up in Google Docs (although, using a Greasemokey Script and a Firefox extension, I do download back up copies fairly regularly, but, ultimately, this will happen on a desktop and not my portable). As a result, I don't need a ton of room on my portable's hard-drive, I just need it to have the processor power to interact with the Internet seamlessly. As a result, I have my docs, email, and pretty much anything else I need accessible to me anywhere I go (or on any computer that can get online).

So, why an Air? When you're on the road, in a small space, or regularly on the move, to have a full sized screen and keyboard (which is where an iPhone falls short) that weighs three pounds and takes up less than an inch of depth is a beautiful thing. Now we just need to get universal free wi-fi across the globe and in the air.

Thanks to Mac for thinking "more as different" ... again.

By the way, if you haven't seen it yet, you can see the Mac Book Air ad here.