Macbook Air Advice Will it?

I am a windows guy I havent owned any apple hardware but itouch and ipad and just got a iphone for the wife.

I really like the 13 inch macbook air I was using it in the store when we got the itouch.

I am currently using a sony vaio laptop i7 8gb with 500gb harddrive extend battery.. Battery life stinks btw.

I use the laptop mostly for RDP to MS systems, Email chat and Word excel. Some photo shop editing. I am sure some apps I use are MS only.

I have been told parallels is the way to go for using MS only software.

Will 128gb get you very far or is the 256gb worth the extra 300 I assume I could a nice usb drive for my extra files I might want to take with me but then I have something else to carry.

I am looking for this to be my primary laptop since I will ebay the sony or pass down to one of the kids I am looking at replacing my MS stuff as they die with apple if this goes well.

I looked at the macpro in the store also. I liked the air for the weight battery life and the screen looked much better.

I will use this alot in low light in the bedroom when the wife watches tv.

With the MBA, you can never upgrade the storage or ram as they are soldered into the logic board.

Another question - did you take a real hard look at the 13" MBP models? Look at weight and true battery life - I am getting over 7 hours on my 17" MBP for normal use, 10 if I watch what I am doing and turn off bluetooth and stick with the trackpad. The biggest thing, both Storage and RAM can be upgraded.

For software that is Windows only, I recommend Bootcamp over any virtual machine software. The only caveat is that you will need to reboot to go between the operating systems. However you lose no performance on either. That way, you are not using shared hardware. If you look hard enough, I bet you will find the equiv in the OSX world. I recently got all my required Windows software either converted over or found equiv software and I deleted my Bootcamp partition.

I have converted or gotten equivs of the following:
MS Office = MS Office for Mac 2011 (way cheaper than the Windows version anyway)
Photoshop = Aperture (again a lot cheaper, but also not as robust, but covered what I was requiring anyway - simple adjustments to photos.)
Sony Vegas Pro = Final Cut Pro
I also have other software I was using and have found equivs. Those three were my main concern.

Deckyon said:

Another question - did you take a look at the 13" MBP models? Both Storage and RAM can be upgraded.

Click to expand...

The 13" MBP doesn't have the "hi-res" screen yet. I'm in the same boat right now: MBA or MBP. I love the portability of the Air, but I feel like 4GB RAM and 1.8GHz processor is pretty weak. The MBP would be better in those specs, but the screen on the 13" MBA (1440x900) looks so much better than the 13" MBP (1280x800).

My take is: Wait for another few months as I am hoping the MBA will get the Ivy Bridge processors and available with 8GB RAM.