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MacBook Air 2010 is a Fragile POS, Totally Vulnerable

I bought a MacBook Air for $999. Because of the all-aluminum frame and the no-moving-parts hard drive, I expected it to be durable.
Unfortunately, while moving a coffee cup to my lips, I spilled a drop or two of coffee on my brand-new MacBook Air. It shut down in about 30 seconds forever, a total loss. All my data is 100% gone forever. $700 to repair.

Of course, I am responsible for my own mistake. Yet, when you start to google: " 'MacBook Air' water", you see legions of customers who have encountered this problem. Couple drops of water in the top--total loss.

Why? The aluminum housing acts like a bath tub.

The design decision to include a single aluminum housing came with consequences. It introduced a new vulnerability not shared by a machine with a porous bottom, one that cooled through the bottom instead of through the keys.

The design decision to move away from a spinning hard drive to flash memory chips naked on the motherboard also came with consequences. When your data is within a hard drive, it is pretty safe--it's raised off the bottom of the laptop. Your precious data is safe. When it's on the motherboard, your precious data is naked to the wind.

The failure mode of a laptop with a traditional hard drive is not pretty but it's survivable. It sucks but you can usually recover all your data. It's also rare to have a motherboard and hard drive fail simultaneously. It's actually pretty hard to make a traditional hard drive fail--they are sealed up tightly.
The failure mode of a MacBook Air is obscene: two drops of water, rain--and everything is gone, all of your data. Your entire motherboard, hard drive, memory--everything--is toast.