Prepping my MBA for iPhone 5 - dilemma

My MBA only has a 128GB hard drive, which means that ever since I got it (a few months ago), I haven't been able to do a full iPhone 4 backup, because the iPhone starts transferring my apps to iTunes and there's not enough room on the MBA HD.

This hasn't been a big problem, but I just realized that I don't know how I'm going to set up my iPhone 5 when it arrives. I know I could move my iTunes library to an external drive, but I really don't want it to live there. I have iTunes Match so, besides apps, everything fits nicely on my MBA. I want my apps to live on my iPhone and iPad, not on my MBA.

Is there a good/easy solution to this? I don't want to sync my iPhone 5 and only have a fraction of my apps put on there, and I don't want to have to re-download them one-by-one from the App Store.

Hmm... this still doesn't solve the problem of me setting up the iPhone 5 without having to individually download each app from the App Store.

Fattytail said:

This.

You'll still have to download each app one-by-one, but at least you won't have to do it manually (i.e., you won't have to go through the Purchased section of the app store and tap on each app you want to download).

Click to expand...

If I have a 32GB iPhone that's close to full, do I have to get the 50GB iCloud account to fully back it up? Or will one of the lower tiers work? In other words, I'm not sure what actually counts toward iCloud storage limits– the apps themselves or just the content with some apps (for example, podcasts downloaded into Downcast).