After years of waiting for an upgrade, the announcement of a new MacBook Air last Tuesday was understandably greeted with some excitement. In an 8/10 review of the device, Wired‘s Lauren Goode referred to the slick new model as the “sushi knife of laptops.” She was particularly impressed by the new retina display,  which boasts a 1,440 by 900 pixel resolution, with 128 pixels per inch pixel density. For all the praise, the review does concede that if you’re someone doing high-end graphics work then this is not the machine for you. It also laments the reduced number of ports on the new MacBook Air. Here is a hint of what Ms. Goode has to say:

If you’re someone who builds graphics, edits 4K videos, or processes large photos for a living, the Air isn’t going to cut it. It will, however, handle 15 to 20 browser tabs at once, let you edit photos in Lightroom without any hiccups, and keep ten apps running smoothly at once. I know because I’m doing all of this right now as I type. The memory can also be configured up to 16GB, which gives it twice as much memory capacity as the previous MacBook Air.

There has been a lot of discussion about Apple’s decision not to reveal hardware unit sales following its earning’s call on Thursday. Investors certainly did not like it and we saw Apple’s stock price tumble by as much as 7% in the aftermath. There is an interesting—if sometimes snarky—piece of analysis on Yahoo! Finance that discusses Apple’s attempts to project itself as a services company, less reliant on hardware sales than it has ever been.  It concludes that this is a transition phase for Apple. Here’s a snippet:

Apple may want to project itself as a services company and want to direct investor attention to the services story and also, how it is a great place for customer satisfaction and security.

But it’s a little hard to sell that story when the services business contributed just 16% of revenue — yes even if that 16% represents a 27% increase from last year after one-time items, and even if that growth rate was substantially higher than the rest of the business.