Trying to figure out best Setup

[thenewguy]

So - I just bought a retina MBP. It works great, except that I'm realizing a few things about my usage patterns that might mean I made a mistake.

I'm a light user that USED to be a power user. I used to tons of heavy photo editing, video editing, 3d gaming, etc. I don't anymore - I edit my own photos when travelling in photoshop (not RAW, nothing crazy intense), I edit short movies (under 10 minutes) usually in iMovie cause its easy. The rest is web browsing, and normal work. No rendering or anything.

The other thing I do do - in small more-and-more-rare spurts is play 3d games. But the mac is really not the platform for that. I'm playing a cider-wrapped Skyrim now and its a bit buggy and slow even on the rMBP.

I'm trying to figure out if it would make more sense for me to have an Air and an external monitor and then a small windows desktop for gaming. Or perhaps an air and an iMac and use bootcamp when I game.

Can anyone speak to how having a 2-mac setup works with syncing and cloud, etc.?

Thanks all

 

[Tankmaze]

Currently I have the mbp and imac, I sync both of them using rsync.
But now i'm going sell the mbp to get either the 13 mba or mbp (my mbp 15 used to be my main machine, and now i'm doing all the work in the 27 imac, so thinking of getting a lightweight mac laptop)

If you wanted an imac it is due for a refresh, so you should wait and see.

 

[falterego]

I use a Mac Mini on my desk at work and a MBA for my mobile work. I use a combination of iCloud and Dropbox to keep everything in sync and I haven't run into a situation where I felt hampered by this setup. I use Parallels for my Windows needs because they are frequent and restarting for boot camp would get to be annoying. I have the full Office suite on the computer, but if work didn't provide that I'd have Pages and Numbers on both systems as well as my iPhone and iPad. The only difference would be using iCloud to sync docs instead of Dropbox.

Using my Apple ID I'm able to access my MM from the MBA for any situation where VPN or Team Viewer doesn't take care of me.