I had several reservations about the stunning Macbook Air when it was announced a few weeks ago. “An incomparable design, but a compromised machine,” I said to several friends.

All laptops are compromises to some extent, but the Macbook Air really pushed the boundaries of what is for me an acceptable trade-off. Nerds across the internet griped about the lack of CD drive or the lack of expansion ports. Those didn’t bother me as much as the lack of speed in the processor and the horrifically slow hard drive in the base model. Unless you opted for the $3000 version with the small but zippy SSD, the Macbook Air was likely to be the prettiest pig ever produced.

ArsTechnica released their preliminary review of the machine this weekend and my worst suspicions have been confirmed.

Turns out the slow base model hard drive is a severe impediment:

Put simply, the Air slows to a halfway-unusable crawl anytime there’s a large amount of disk activity—running a browser that reads and writes a lot to the drive (*cough* Firefox), transferring files over the network in the background, anything. The cruel and unusual 4200rpm drive began burning me on my first evening using the Air, and has continued to burn me every evening since.

That’s real ugly. OS X is wonderful when it operates smoothly—it almost disappears into the background, letting you get on with whatever it is you’re doing. It’s sad to hear that it’s unable to do so when it’s sitting in Apple’s most stunning enclosure to date.

But wait, there’s more:

I’ll cut to the chase here: the MacBook Air’s battery life sucks. A lot. I found it to be a pretty big disappointment, holding it to my admittedly-high standards. I ran down the battery from full charge four times and came out with an average of two hours and 33 minutes.

Consider me officially uninterested.

Ars promised a follow-up with a review of the SSD-enabled model tomorrow. This should definitely improve the abominable hard drive performance, and might even help the battery last a bit longer. But then again, for $3000 this svelte beauty had better be doing all that and making me scrambled eggs in the morning too.