The MacBook Air is my first Mac ever (2011 iMac is technically my first but I had to return it after a week). The fact that it so sleek and thin and weighs next to nothing was the main reason why I chose it.
I took a workshop at the Apple Store today and we were all given 15" MacBook Pros for use. It is such a fine machine, a great balance between size, power, and weight (not too bulky, screen is a good size, not too heavy). It just felt like such a solid piece of machinery when I was resting my hands on it and navigating OS X with it.
I often use my MacBook Air as a desktop and I kind of liked the feeling of having a solid palm rest on the MacBook Pro. It just felt so stable compared to the Air. Because I got the MacBook Air for such a huge discount (20% Kindle Special Offers discount), I'm highly considering selling it and getting a 15" Pro with high-res antiglare.
Anyone else have the novelty of the Air wear off on them and find the Pro to be a much more suitable laptop?
I feel like I am in a similar boat. I got the new MBA and it is awesome for its size and weight and what all we can do with it. But there are a couple of things which I feel now after using it for roughly 3 months.
1. Hi-res screen: It is a little stressful for my eyes. I am 26 and have a good vision but the low res display on 15" actually feels more comfortable to me. I usually use an external display (21" size with 1080p res) with my MBA and sometimes extend it such that I can use both these displays together. However, when I do this, the difference in pixel density between the MBA hi-res screen and my external display causes strain on my eyes. This happens a lot when I am reading something on my external display and then suddenly switch to the MBA display to read something else.
2. Video playback: If I am using just the MBA to watch videos (HD, Youtube 1080p, flash, etc.), they run pretty smooth. But when I connect my MBA to my external display and use both of them, I can see that the videos start to get a little jerky. I think this is due to the lack of an dedicated GPU. The Intel IGP is good when you are just using the MBA display, but not the best otherwise.
3. 4GB RAM: I use Chrome as my primary browser because it has very good extensions and add-ons. I also find it to be faster when compared to Firefox. However, the negative side of Chrome is that it uses a LOT of RAM. I also use VMs fairly often for my research and usually adding all this up together, my MBA's RAM usage is usually at its brim. I can notice performance degradation when the RAM usage is almost at full (apps respond little slow). Even though it is greatly mitigated due to the fast paging by its SSD, it is still perceivable.
MBA is one of the best machines out there for its performance, size, features, quality, high capacity SSD, and also price (I got a good best-buy deal). However, I think if you are student or a power user and you want this to be your main machine, I would recommend to think twice or at least try it out from a friend before purchasing it.
I am a student who uses his computer a lot and I wanted to make my MBA as my primary machine (by connecting it to an external display, mouse, keyboard, etc.). However now I can feel that more ram (8GB), a dedicated GPU, etc. are some of the things that I really miss. Also, the thing with dedicated GPUs is that now-a-days with abundant hardware acceleration in web browsers, video encoding/decoding, etc, these are not just helpful for people who are into games or multimedia but for anyone else as well.
I think I will wait till the new 15" models come out early next year and will then probably switch to that.
