I just got a Macbook Air. Quite an amazing little machine from a hardware standpoint. The only thing that is taking me a little bit of getting used to is the keyboard, but that is to be expected. The screen is mat, which is critical because I don't like glossy screens.
I feel like I have the best of all worlds. I have a unix based operating system, so development work is terrific. I have installed Eclipse, with C++ and Java modules. I have also installed Mono for C#, and the Mac CUDA environment works with the nVidia 320M (although no developer CUDA nVidia drivers for Windows, which really sucks). Battery life is decent, I get about 3 hours on nearly max brightness, using it pretty continuously with the CPU often being taxed. With two cores I genuinely feel like I am on a desktop it is plenty fast.
What about MSWindows you ask? Easy, I bought Parallels, and I can run windows inside it's own window while I am booted in the MacOS. Everything runs perfectly. All my Visual Studio native to windows works without a hitch. Even with only 2GB, I have several apps open with Parallels running Windows 7, and it all works completely smoothly as if I had two separate computers.
The only thing it can't replace is a Kindle like device. It is not quite the same thing to be carrying around a device that is so easy on the eyes, and it is much easier to carry around a Kindle or iPad than even an Air. Still, I have bought/downloaded some kindle books for the mac, and while it is taking me some time to get used to not having a book in my hand, that is to be expected. The note taking feature, the embedded dictionary are cool. One thing I don't know if I can do is, say I want to link a text from one book that I own to another, can I do that in Kindle for mac? That would be very useful. Having Wolfram Alpha available inside a Kindle book also if I click on something (the way the dictionary works) would be out of this world useful. So if I have an equation like E=mc^2 in a Kindle book, if I clicked it what good would a dictionary do? Having it call Wolfram Alpha would be super cool. This is the future of education, and accessing linked knowledge in general.
So 4.5 stars out of 5 for the Macbook Air. To get a 5 out of 5 from me, the thing would have to be perfect (longer battery life, be able to rotate screen and lay it flat so that it looks and acts like a big iPad with the screen being touch sensitive etc), and that is probably impossible because I am very demanding of computers. It comes as close as possible as a laptop can.
I feel like I have the best of all worlds. I have a unix based operating system, so development work is terrific. I have installed Eclipse, with C++ and Java modules. I have also installed Mono for C#, and the Mac CUDA environment works with the nVidia 320M (although no developer CUDA nVidia drivers for Windows, which really sucks). Battery life is decent, I get about 3 hours on nearly max brightness, using it pretty continuously with the CPU often being taxed. With two cores I genuinely feel like I am on a desktop it is plenty fast.
What about MSWindows you ask? Easy, I bought Parallels, and I can run windows inside it's own window while I am booted in the MacOS. Everything runs perfectly. All my Visual Studio native to windows works without a hitch. Even with only 2GB, I have several apps open with Parallels running Windows 7, and it all works completely smoothly as if I had two separate computers.
The only thing it can't replace is a Kindle like device. It is not quite the same thing to be carrying around a device that is so easy on the eyes, and it is much easier to carry around a Kindle or iPad than even an Air. Still, I have bought/downloaded some kindle books for the mac, and while it is taking me some time to get used to not having a book in my hand, that is to be expected. The note taking feature, the embedded dictionary are cool. One thing I don't know if I can do is, say I want to link a text from one book that I own to another, can I do that in Kindle for mac? That would be very useful. Having Wolfram Alpha available inside a Kindle book also if I click on something (the way the dictionary works) would be out of this world useful. So if I have an equation like E=mc^2 in a Kindle book, if I clicked it what good would a dictionary do? Having it call Wolfram Alpha would be super cool. This is the future of education, and accessing linked knowledge in general.
So 4.5 stars out of 5 for the Macbook Air. To get a 5 out of 5 from me, the thing would have to be perfect (longer battery life, be able to rotate screen and lay it flat so that it looks and acts like a big iPad with the screen being touch sensitive etc), and that is probably impossible because I am very demanding of computers. It comes as close as possible as a laptop can.
