I spent today walking around San Francisco, from my hotel near Union Square to the Chinatown gate, then to the ferry building and along the Embarcadero to Pier 39, then Fisherman’s Wharf and back, carrying my MacBook Air and Nikon D90.
I found the weight of the MacBook Air to be almost unnoticeable. On my last trip, I had a 15″ MacBook Pro, which seemed to get heavier after hours of carrying it. I stopped several places with WiFi and used my MacBook Air for a total of about 3 1/2 hours without plugging it in at all while running Aperture, downloading photos from a SD card, and uploading photos to Flickr. When I got back to my hotel, the battery was only down to about 50% and it claimed 4 hours time remaining.
The MacBook Air doesn’t seem any slower than the MacBook Pro, and certain things like launching applications is actually faster. It’s a lot lighter and easier to carry than the MacBook Pro and seems potentially less fragile due to not having a hard drive, so it makes a much better travel companion.
Here’s one of the many photos I took today. You can see the rest of them on Flickr.
Have you tried to use it for development (XCode/iOS in particular?). I'm still tossing up if I will replace my 4yo MacBook Pro with a nice new MBP or try a MacBook Air instead. Need to be able to code on it though…
Cheers,
Chris
Yes, I use it for development. When I'm home I use distcc to distribute builds to my 27" Core i7 iMac, which makes compiling painless. I also did some compiling without distcc on my flight yesterday and found it to be quite acceptable.