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Is the MacBook Air thin because we really need it to be thin, or just because we want to show off? Discuss.

I'm not saying I don't like the MacBook Air. It looks great in photos. But don't you find yourself reacting the same way as when you see Keira Knightley in a film? Eat something! If I wanted to look at bones on a big screen, I'd go to an archaeology lecture. Nobody needs to be that skinny.

How did we end up here? In June 1999, MacUser had the latest PowerBook on the cover with the headline 'To die for: backstage with the supermodels'. See, the G3 laptop was only 43mm round the waist. Well, you could fit two Airs in there and still have room for a pack of Manila envelopes. Controversially, achieving that size meant ditching the PowerBook's second expansion slot. The Air has none.

Another milestone of miniaturisation was the iPod nano. Launching it in 2005, Steve Jobs boasted that it would fit in that odd little pocket in a pair of jeans. By an amazing coincidence, he was wearing a pair of jeans in which there was indeed something odd about that little pocket: it was extra large. D'oh! But would we really have wanted our nanos any smaller?

Some other Apple announcements could have benefited from the 'big pocket' trick. By standing very close to the audience while placing the machine far away, John Sculley could have made the 1989 Mac Portable look portable. In 1996, Gil Amelio could have pretended he was paying only a modest price for Jobs' NeXT operating system by hiring David Copperfield to make the pile of cash appear to fit inside

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a single truck.

Anyway, the nano was followed by the 2006iPod shuffle, which was so small that not only would it fit in your littlest pocket, it would probably get lost in there, tucked under a stamp or tangled up in a hairgrip. To prevent this, it came with a clip, but at this size, what could you realistically clip it to - an eyelash? Never mind the lack of an LCD screen, what it really needed was a tracking device.

Still, the tiny shuffle has remained popular, except with Apple Store employees, who can't sign off a stocktake until they go through the iPod section with a dustpan and brush and pick over the sweepings with a pair of tweezers.

'Is that another shuffle?'

'Where?'

'Under that contact lens.'

'Um... I can just see what looks like a little bug.'

'Oh, you mean it plays your music in random order? It's actually meant to do that.'

And, of course, where Apple goes, others inevitably follow. One of Panasonic's tiniest iPod rivals was promoted with an ad (youtube.com/watch?v=H19tXGvcZyE) that shows a gym bimbo working out to a Barry White track. With no music player visible, the headphone cord disappears inside her shorts. Geddit?

Fair enough, it's probably a lot more comfortable than a CD Walkman. But when most people buy an MP3 player, they just want it to fit in a pocket. And when most people buy a laptop, they just want it to fit on their lap. Whether it's slim enough to go in the internal mail is probably not such a big deal.

'Bob, when I asked you to send me over that presentation, I only needed the Keynote file, not your whole MacBook.'

'Sorry, it slipped so easily into that manila envelope that I couldn't resist. Can you send it back to me now?'

'All right, I'll just copy off the preso on to a USB stick. If I unplug the mouse, I can slot it into this single USB port... No, it doesn't seem to fit right. Hang on, I've got an Ethernet point here I can hook up to... Ah. No Ethernet. Look, I'll just pop out and get onto the wifi at Starbucks, then I can email the file back to myself. Wow, Bob, this thing is so easy to carry - talk about convenient!'