I just wanted to say that I am very impressed with my new 2011 13" i5 256GB Air that I recently purchased. I do a mix of Windows administration as well as OS X use. For the Windows administration, I use VMware Fusion - mainly because of the stability and I support other VMware ESXi servers. The interesting thing is that with the SSD and the RAM in the Air, I can successfully run VMs with unreasonably low amounts of RAM. For example, my administration console is running Windows Server 2003 in a VM, and VMware allocates it 384MB of RAM. I didn't think this would be enough at first, thinking maybe 1-2GB, but I went with it anyway. I also installed Microsoft Office 2010 in that VM as I depend on that as well. After installing the VMware vSphere Client and a few more applications I use in Windows, I still did not see a performance hit in the VM. Microsoft Outlook 2010 is running against an Exchange Server 2010 server, and I have a rather large mailbox in there. Launching any of the applications in the VM are very quick, and there is no obvious slowdowns or paging going on. Not to mention it leaves plenty of resources for OS X when needed as well. The battery life still is around 7 hours with the VMware running.
Just wanted to throw that out there for people interested in VMs and running them on the Air - the SSD and processing power of the Air make it a seamless experience. For the record, I am running Fusion 3 instead of the newly released 4, and 3 runs on Lion just fine.
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Also, I should add, that I am very happy with Lion on this machine as well. . The boot speed is excellent as is working in the OS. Very happy and love the full screen Terminal and other apps that I can swipe back and forth to.
I did install Snow Leopard on the Air because I like to tinker and to see how it would run. I got it to install and updated it to 10.6.8 but the performance was worse than Lion because video acceleration did not work. Also, it would not recognize the trackpad natively either (in System Preferences it said to connect a Bluetooth trackpad). It was fun to try, no less. Wireless worked, I had the correct screen resolution, audio worked, but it was not good for day-to-day use (I left it on less than a day).
It seems like this Air was built for Lion, and the performance shows. I also don't have any of the wireless connection issues when resuming from sleep that others have reported.
Just wanted to throw that out there for people interested in VMs and running them on the Air - the SSD and processing power of the Air make it a seamless experience. For the record, I am running Fusion 3 instead of the newly released 4, and 3 runs on Lion just fine.
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Also, I should add, that I am very happy with Lion on this machine as well. . The boot speed is excellent as is working in the OS. Very happy and love the full screen Terminal and other apps that I can swipe back and forth to.
I did install Snow Leopard on the Air because I like to tinker and to see how it would run. I got it to install and updated it to 10.6.8 but the performance was worse than Lion because video acceleration did not work. Also, it would not recognize the trackpad natively either (in System Preferences it said to connect a Bluetooth trackpad). It was fun to try, no less. Wireless worked, I had the correct screen resolution, audio worked, but it was not good for day-to-day use (I left it on less than a day).
It seems like this Air was built for Lion, and the performance shows. I also don't have any of the wireless connection issues when resuming from sleep that others have reported.
