I know many PC owners react to new Mac products with an ire usually reserved for a looter on benefits, but I’ve been without a laptop for nearly a year now, and this Sandy Bridge generation of Air has finally won me over.

The merits and otherwise of buying Apple kit are not the point of this blog though. This blog is about the Apple Store — or, more specifically, how utterly terrifying it is.

I’ve never been in one before, ever. I’ve walked past many times, and always been struck by how unlike a shop it looks. Now I know: that’s because it is totally unlike any normal shop.

Walking in as an Apple Store virgin, it’s impossible to figure out what you’re supposed to do. To the left and right of the front door, people are checking their emails and posting Facebook updates on MacBooks. To the back there are “Personal Setup” stands, manned by staff with smiles that would scare Cherie Blair. Upstairs are Genius bars and iPod stands, and rack upon rack of accessories, where shoppers with glazed expressions try things on for size as if this were a Topshop sale.

But nowhere is there a bloody till! A simple sign that says “Pay here”. Where do you, y’know, actually buy things?

After ten minutes not unlike the experience of walking past a Scientology centre — head down, ignore the cheery clones, don’t give them money — I eventually asked a woman idly standing in the middle where I could go to hand someone money in exchange for an expensive Apple product.

“Ask the man over there with the iPad 2,” she replied. The man with the iPad 2. Obviously.

I found the only man with an iPad 2 that wasn’t covered with drool, and I asked him if I could buy a laptop, please sir thank you very much. He took my name and told me the next available assistant would be ten minutes. Other people were waiting there too, just milling around in the middle. Worst still, there seemed to be no concept of a physical queue.

Ten minutes later a man with an iPhone 4 walked over and introduced himself (”Hi David!”) with the kind of enthusiasm I only just muster at my annual salary appraisals. He clicked through a few order screens on an idle MacBook, then we had a perfectly pleasant chat about his Windows PC (seriously) while an order progress screen ticked over with agonising slowness. From behind me a man appeared holding my MacBook Air, handed it over, then vanished again. I’d been here 20 minutes by this point.

To pay, we walked over to a card terminal sitting randomly in a corner, where I entered my pin, while my new best friend put my purchase into a trendy pull-cord shoulder bag with no useful carrying handle. “That’s great, David, I’ll just grab your receipt.”

The receipt was somewhere at the back of the store, presumably coming out of an actual till that remains hidden because it’s not wafer-thin and made of machined aluminium. He walked back over and handed it to me, shook my hand and hoped to see me again like an old friend, and I gratefully stepped back out into the pouring rain.

When I compare the simple experience of buying this laptop with that of the last one I bought, I’m shocked by how stressful this was. Last time, I walked in, pointed to a laptop, went to a till and paid. It took five minutes at most, and that was in the hell otherwise known as PC World.

Much as I love my new MacBook Air, I would take that experience over the horrifying Apple Store every single time.

So it was with some pleasure that I could finally get my hands on a production model at Dell’s Versailles-based event today. And I have to say, it’s a very impressive piece of kit.

Dell makes much of the fact that the body is machined from one piece of metal (rather similar to our old friend the Apple MacBook Pro) and in the hand it feels extremely well made. It’s rock solid to the touch and exudes class.

As with the MacBook, there’s no way for users to replace the battery – according to Dell, though, so far none of its customers have expressed any concern about this, and “it’s only a ten minute job”. It’s just that you’ll need a Dell engineer to do that job…

Nevertheless, this does mean Dell can be innovative when it comes to the battery design (apparently, the cells themselves resemble ketchup sachets) and some recompense comes in the form of a sleek underside complete with a plaque explaining what you’ve just bought. I’ll deftly ignore the fact this will likely be ruined by asset stickers if, as is rather likely, the Adamo is to be used in a company.

The attention to detail stretches to other areas of the Adamo too. Note that the holes at the back of the machine are square, not round; this makes the manufacturing process far more difficult (I’m assured magnets are involved to remove the squares) but also results, Dell claims, in superior air flow

We hoped this would mean the fan rarely needed to kick in, but playing back a standard-resolution video in Windows Media shattered this dream. It’s only a low level of noise, but it’s enough to be noticeable.

In return, at least the Adamo is quite responsive. From our previous experience with laptops using a 1.2GHz Core 2 Duo SU9300, it’s just enough to run as a main computer, and the 2GB of DDR3 RAM is ample for the supplied Windows Vista Home Premium. A 128GB solid state disk helps to reduce stutters too.

It proved pleasant to use in other ways too. The keyboard is a pleasure to type on, the trackpad responsive and the 13.4in screen glossy and sharp. It didn’t have the punch of the very best screens, but few will complain.

The problem for Dell is the price. At £1,434 (£1,649 inc VAT) it’s around £250 more expensive than the 2.13GHz MacBook Air. We’ll look forward to getting the Adamo in the PC Pro Lab to see if it can justify that premium.

I found myself thinking that, well, maybe this isn’t actually a bad thing – in our day-to-day lives, who uses their optical drive on a regular basis any more?

My laptop is used on the train or on the sofa, for example, and I’m normally playing a game or working. The game doesn’t use a disc, and neither does Microsoft Word. Listening to music doesn’t need a CD anymore, as I have my mp3 player, and the vast majority of applications that I have on my laptop don’t require the CD in the drive to boot.

Of course, Samsung has included a USB DVD drive if you need to use a CD, but the excellent battery life means that this, surely, can be left at home more often than not – it’ll usually be wheeled out for an occasional product install, for instance.

I suppose that the optical drive could now be considered virtually redundant for the majority of users most of the time. It also appears that the Macbook Air may have actually done something right. What do you think?

I was expecting it to be an inconsiderate iPod owner tapping away to the beat. In fact, it was another Apple product to blame – the MacBook Air.

The chap in the row opposite was rattling out a document, with his laptop hanging precariously over the edge of the train table, so as not to steal any more than half of the available table space (the unwritten rule of laptop etiquette on the Brighton line).

This meant that every time he laid his wrists on the MacBook to start typing, the rear end of the laptop gently lifted off the surface, with the edge of the table acting as a pivot. Henceforth, every ten seconds or so, between sentences, the MacBook would slap back down on to the table, causing untold distress not only to the Mac fanboy’s fellow passengers, but no doubt to the hard disk and other components being jiggled around inside the laptop.

Such laptop slapping isn’t a problem for me, with my portly work-issue ThinkPad 3000 series; you would need to drop a bag of sugar on the wrist wrest to tempt the back end to lift even a millimetre off the table. But when your laptop weighs only three pounds and is as lean as Kate Moss’s best mate, that suddenly becomes an issue.

Admittedly, there’s a fairly limited set of circumstances where it becomes a problem. But if Jonathan Ive could find it within himself to design an optional dead-weight attachment for the MacBook Air, I and the rest of the Sussex-bound commuters would be forever in his debt.

This is Rahul Sood, the founder of VoodooPC and now CTO of HP’s gaming business, cutting his birthday cake with a MacBook Air:

“I assure you no Macs were harmed in the taking of this photo,” Sood claims on his blog. The same can’t be said for HP’s reputation, however. After all, had he attempted to do likewise with a HP laptop, there probably wouldn’t be a cake left.