The lack of a user-replaceable battery in the MacBook Air is already being seen as a substantial flaw in the new notebook's design, but it turns out that Apple will offer a reasonable price for an in-house replacement: $129, or the same amount of a new MacBook Pro battery. Just take your new MacBook Air to the nearest Apple store, or send it in through a mail service, and you're supposed to get it back fairly quickly. The only thing that would make this a major hassle would be if the battery was found to be more susceptible to overheating (it's possible) or if its benchmarks went lower than the expected 5 hrs.
So at this point, the battery issue should be a moot point. While we think that battery accessibility and battery life are two of the most underrated aspects of the consumer electronics business (years of bad cell-phone charging has had some influence over that), the power and portability of this little notebook make the battery expectations quite sensible.
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