A beta of Skype 5.0 for Mac is out, and looks promising.

I like ridiculously small notebooks. There was a time when I used a truly diminutive Fujitsu subnotebook called the Lifebook B112 as my main mobile machine. I also have a soft spot for netbooks. I’m willing to make compromises to shed weight–such as dealing with cramped keyboards, squinting at small screens, and learning to use abnormal pointing devices.

In recent years. though, I’ve tended to use laptops that were reasonably compact–13″ is my favorite–but not ridiculously small. That’s in part because I’ve used Macs as much as I have Windows laptops, and no Mac notebook has been anywhere near midget-sized. The closest Apple has gotten to tiny has been the MacBook Air, and until last week, the MacBook Air (with its 13.3″ screen) hasn’t been so much small as thin and light. All Airs up until the new models have also pretty basic in terms of specs and kind of pricey–which is why they never tempted me.

But a week and a half ago, Apple announced the first all-new Airs since the original version. The prices are lower, the specs are better, and there’s a new model with an 11.6″ display. It weighs 2.3 pounds and is .11″ at its thinnest point, making Apple’s smallest Mac portable ever–much more so than my late, lamented 12″ PowerBook, the smallest Mac I’d used until now. It also starts at a temptingly low $999. I’ve been living with one (loaned to me by Apple) since the press event.

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Microsoft’s Office 2011 for the Mac goes on sale today–the first version to support Office’s Ribbon interface, the first one in years with Outlook, and one that’s priced to move. The company provided me with a pre-release copy a few weeks ago, and when I’ve been using a Mac I’ve been running Office and mostly enjoying the experience. That wasn’t a given: I mostly avoided its predecessor, Office 2008, which was slow and not only lacked the Ribbon but had a floating-palette interface I actively disliked. (I was known to run a virtualized copy of Windows on Macs mostly so I could use Windows Office.)

For some people, the fact that Microsoft–a company who has been known to deride Apple’s customers as trendy spendthrifts–still makes Office for the Mac is apparently hard to reconcile. Microsoft’s press site has a story that seems designed both to reassure Apple fans that Microsoft loves them and Microsoft fans that it doesn’t love Apple fans that much.

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Can we all agree that Apple will be the first major computer manufacturer to stop using hard drives? I assume so, anyhow–although I’m still trying to figure out just when it’ll happen.

I’ve been using a new MacBook Air which Apple loaned me for review–thoughts coming soon–and it didn’t take me very long to discover that it didn’t have Adobe’s FlashPlayer preinstalled. To be honest, I wasn’t sure whether there was anything noteworthy about that–I couldn’t remember whether any Mac I’d ever used came with Flash, or whether I’d just installed it myself. In this case I did the latter (although–odd coincidence–going to the Flash download page got me an error message at first, and I had to come back later).

But as Daring Fireball’s John Gruber writes, the lack of Flash is a new twist in the Apple-Adobe squabble. Apple says that it’s still cheerfully supporting Flash, and that downloading it from Adobe is the best way to get the safest, most current version. Others, of course, may draw more conspiratorial conclusions. (The timing is probably a coincidence, but it’s an interesting one: The news is hitting right before Adobe’s big, news-filled conference MAX kicks off.)

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Apple’s big press event yesterday previewed OS X, introduced iLife ’11 and two new MacBook Air models, and provided lots to chew on–including decisions on Apple’s part that are bound to be controversial. I’m working on some stories about the news (including a hands-on look at the 11.6″ MacBook Air) but in the meantime I’m interested in what you think. So here’s a T-Poll extravaganza with five questions for you.

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We’re live from Cupertino! Join us at Technologizer.com/macfuture.

Once again, Apple will be Webcasting its Mac event today, albeit in a form only viewable on Apple devices. I recommend watching it if you can–but don’t forget to come hang out and discuss the news at our liveblog coverage.

Quick reminder: I’ll be in Cupertino Wednesday morning at 10am PT for Apple’s “Back the Mac” press confab. We know that the company will talk about OS X for the first time, and everyone seems to assume there will be a new MacBook Air (or two) as well. I predict a surprise, too–mainly because I’d like to see one.

Join me at technologizer.com/macfuture, won’t you? And tell your friends…

TechCrunch’s MG Siegler says he’s never once used the DVD burner on his MacBook Pro and is therefore excited about the possibility of a superlight, driveless MacBook Air. I keep going back and forth on whether optical drives are superfluous yet: They’re still occasionally handy for installing software, and I still use them to watch movies (or just rip them into a form I can watch on any device). I figure that three years from now, they’ll be quite unusual–but I could be wrong, since I would have guessed three years ago that they’d be almost extinct by late 2010…

A smaller, thinner, cheaper MacBook Air with no moving parts? Sounds like it could be the first Mac to be majorly influenced by the iPad and iPhone…

Apple is holding a media event next Wednesday at 10am PT at its headquarters in Cupertino. Its invite is–for Apple–relatively non-cryptic: The event is called Back to the Mac, and Apple promises a look at “what’s new for the Mac…including a sneak peek of the next major version of Mac OS X.”

I’ll be in the audience that morning liveblogging my heart out. You can join me at technologizer.com/macfuture, and I hope you will.

Meanwhile, we have  a week to muse about what the future holds for Apple’s operating system. It’s been almost exactly three years since OS X 10.5 Leopard was released–back in a very different era for Apple. (The iPhone had just barely shipped and wasn’t yet a platform for third-party apps; the iPad as we know it may not even have been a glint in Steve Jobs’s eye.)

Last year’s 10.6 Snow Leopard was almost entirely about modernization below the surface, not new features. And if past Apple practice holds true this time around, it’ll be well into 2011 before Lion, or whatever it’s called, shows up. So the time would be right for a major upgrade–one which aims to keep the Mac relevant for a long time to come. That’s what I’m rooting for, anyhow, and I’ll share my wish list before the event happens.

Mac users, what do you want to see in a big new OS X update?

Over at Techland (where I’m guestblogging a couple of times a week–come visit!) I wrote about the tendency of lots of pundits to assume that the smartphone wars will inevitably repeat the PC wars, with Apple’s tightly-managed iPhone getting trounced by the widely-dispersed Android ecosystem. In the Techland post, I explain why I don’t think that’s a given. One big reason why is the existence of the Internet–if all phones end up being portals to an open-standards Net, there’s no particular reason why multiple platforms can’t thrive.

With bigger, traditional computers, we’re already largely there. For operating systems, the Web is a diplomatic place where it doesn’t really matter what OS you’re using as long as you’ve got a modern browser. And nearly all peripherals such as printers, cameras, and networking gizmos work equally well with Windows and Macs. It’s wildly different from the 1980s and 1990s, when the computing universe rotated around Microsoft’s platform and there were lots of things which Macheads simply could not do.

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A couple of years ago, I took advantage of the Q&A session at an Apple press event to ask Steve Jobs if Apple might release touch-screen Macs. (I did so on behalf of a Technologizer community member.) Jobs told me that the company had experimented with the idea and didn’t think it made sense just yet. At the time, I noted that this answer didn’t preclude the possibility of touch-screen Macs–it was pretty much the stock response that he always gives about potential Apple products, right up until the moment that the company releases the item in question.

Now DigiTimes is reporting apparent concrete evidence of a touch Mac that might not be all that far from release: Apple is supposedly testing touch-screen panels for new iMacs.

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For years, Microsoft’s marketing efforts for Windows ignored the fact that Macs existed. That changed last year. In the wake of rising sales for Apple’s computers, Microsoft went on the offensive. But the case it made for Windows PCs and against the Mac was touchy and evasive. It ran PC ads that knocked Macs as overpriced but couldn’t find anything nice to say about Windows. It got pointlessly insulting about Mac users. And it commissioned a white paper on the “Apple tax” that was rife with fuzzy math and bizarre errors.

All that stuff happened in the late, not-at-all-lamented Windows Vista era. Back then, you could understand why Microsoft would be crabby about the whole subject of Windows vs. Mac–especially since Apple was repeatedly sucker-punching Vista in the face, via the meanest ads ever in its long-running “Get a Mac” campaign.

Today, however, is a new day. Vista has been replaced by the vastly superior Windows 7. Apple seems to have ditched the “Get a Mac” campaign in favor of a much lower-key, lower-profile Mac/PC comparison section on its site. And now Microsoft has responded in kind with a “Deciding Between a PC and a Mac” section on the Windows 7 site.

As with much of Microsoft’s consumer marketing for Windows, this new comparison is aimed at teeming masses of folks who don’t know a whole lot about computers, not geeks and enthusiasts. It clearly strives to come off as calm and reasoned, not snarky and emotional. There’s as much boosting of Windows as there is knocking of the Mac, and the whole thing is free of name-calling.

Let’s look at Microsoft’s claims, section by section. I understand that Microsoft isn’t going to make a balanced comparison of pros and cons here; you won’t hear about the hassle of dealing with Windows security, or the fact that few PCs come standard with creativity software to rival the iLife suite that’s bundled with every Mac. But checking out Microsoft’s case for Windows in the age of Windows 7 is a worthwhile exercise. And it’s reasonable to expect that even marketing copy should contain no gross mischaracterizations or factual errors, right?

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Microsoft said Monday that it was expecting to release Office for Mac 2011 in October, while at the same time cutting the price as much as 50 percent to bring pricing in line with its Windows counterparts. Two versions of the software will be made available, one directed at academics and the other for business.

Microsoft Office for Mac Home and Student 2011 will include World, Excel, Powerpoint, and Microsoft’s instant messaging application for Mac OS X. The business version will include all of the above applications plus Outlook, which will replace Entourage as Office’s e-mail client on the Mac.

Pricing for the student version ill be $119 for a single license, and $149 for a family license which allows for installation on up to three machines. This compares to a single license price of $149 for Office 2008. For Office for Mac Home and Business 2011, a single license is now $199, down from $399, and a family license $279.

At any time, a user will be able to upgrade from the Student to Business version using online upgrade functionality, Microsoft said.

A $99 version of the business suite would also be made available, but only to those in higher-education. Proof of employment or enrollment in an academic institution would likely be required to take advantage of the discount.

Those who purchase Office for Mac 2008 after Monday will be eligible to upgrade to the new version at no cost, Microsoft said. To receive the free upgrade, the purchaser must register at Microsoft’s website.