I want to buy a MacBook Air this month to use through college. I've been a Mac aspirant for years but have never been able to afford one (apart from a 5-year-old Mac Mini I got for almost nothing, which is about what it was worth). I'm coming from an HP Envy 14 with Windows 8, which is a reasonably solid computer -- not without its problems, but I've gotten used to being able to run just about anything, and I'm a little worried about going to a computer that's "underpowered".
Before anyone recommends the rMBP: I don't want to buy it without Haswell (I keep hearing about performance issues in the current generation, and that battery life...) I also don't want to wait around until fall for the Haswell upgrade and miss the back to school promos, etc.
I don't play games very often, but every month or so I get the urge to play something, so I'll probably end up with a Boot Camp Win8 partition. I want to be able to run Star Wars: The Old Republic, Star Trek Online, Skyrim...maybe a few other games in this vein. I'll probably also have some older games installed in OS X that have been ported over.
Will the MBA i5/8/128 be sufficient, performance- and storage-wise? Do I need to upgrade to 256? I don't have more than about 10 GB max of personal files that I store locally -- most everything is in the cloud.
A few other questions from a soon-to-be-ex Windows user:
How's the SkyDrive app on Mac? Most of my files are in SkyDrive, although I'd be willing to move them somewhere else if the Mac app is terrible.
I've also been heavily reliant on the Google ecosystem for a long time. Should I continue to rely mostly on Google webapps or use native Mac apps? I guess more pertinently, should I migrate completely to the Apple ecosystem? My documents, for example, are spread all over the place currently -- some are Office documents in SkyDrive, some are Google Docs, and some are random .doc/.txt files I have saved locally. I want to consolidate them, but where, and in what format? Should I get iWork? Office for Mac? Put them all in Google Drive or keep them locally? If I have iWork documents saved locally on my SSD, iCloud will keep them backed up in the cloud, right?
I'm sure I'll have more questions -- I'll ask as they come to me. Looking for the best, most convenient workflow, and I'm more than willing to change to the Apple way of doing things if it will make things easier in the future.
Before anyone recommends the rMBP: I don't want to buy it without Haswell (I keep hearing about performance issues in the current generation, and that battery life...) I also don't want to wait around until fall for the Haswell upgrade and miss the back to school promos, etc.
I don't play games very often, but every month or so I get the urge to play something, so I'll probably end up with a Boot Camp Win8 partition. I want to be able to run Star Wars: The Old Republic, Star Trek Online, Skyrim...maybe a few other games in this vein. I'll probably also have some older games installed in OS X that have been ported over.
Will the MBA i5/8/128 be sufficient, performance- and storage-wise? Do I need to upgrade to 256? I don't have more than about 10 GB max of personal files that I store locally -- most everything is in the cloud.
A few other questions from a soon-to-be-ex Windows user:
How's the SkyDrive app on Mac? Most of my files are in SkyDrive, although I'd be willing to move them somewhere else if the Mac app is terrible.
I've also been heavily reliant on the Google ecosystem for a long time. Should I continue to rely mostly on Google webapps or use native Mac apps? I guess more pertinently, should I migrate completely to the Apple ecosystem? My documents, for example, are spread all over the place currently -- some are Office documents in SkyDrive, some are Google Docs, and some are random .doc/.txt files I have saved locally. I want to consolidate them, but where, and in what format? Should I get iWork? Office for Mac? Put them all in Google Drive or keep them locally? If I have iWork documents saved locally on my SSD, iCloud will keep them backed up in the cloud, right?
I'm sure I'll have more questions -- I'll ask as they come to me. Looking for the best, most convenient workflow, and I'm more than willing to change to the Apple way of doing things if it will make things easier in the future.
