TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

MacStories’s Cody Fink has a few observations he made while at a local Apple store recently. Among them is this, about how people responded to the MacBook Air:

If it wasn’t the first comment, the second immediate observation was that the computer was missing a ”CD-Rom drive”. I had to have heard this comment from every person who stopped by to check out the Airs, and it was almost always said just like that. In some cases it was a deal breaker, and potential customers weren’t interested in making their way to MacBook Pros in the crowded store.

It’s still a big hang up for non-geeks, who are afraid of being without an optical drive. Their fear may be irrational, because they likely don’t use their optical drive for much now, but it is a real fear and is holding the MacBook Air back from greater sales among new Mac users.