I took my MBA on holiday to Spain over the Easter break and it’s just awesome as a light travel companion.
It worked flawlessly, was no hassle lugging around the airport, worked fine on the Hotel’s free wireless network and best of all: it fits into a normal size room safe. No more chaining up your notebook to the radiators (of which they were of course none) or just worrying about it getting stolen.
The MacBook Air: the only way to travel.
As I lug my 17″ MacBook Pro around the house, I do notice how bulky and heavy it is but then it’s a desktop replacement. That said, even the 17″ screen cannot adequately serve my needs for screen space as an hour working with XCode today proved. I need maybe 2x the amount of space which would be ably served by an external screen. But, I hear you say, external screens are not particularly portable and that’s very true.
I have been spoiled though. Would you believe that I actually enjoy fetching the MacBook Air owned by my SO from another room? It allows me a couple of minutes to hold the unit, appreciate the thin-ness of the unit, how light it is and how easy it is to carry along with other things. I can definitely see a MacBook Air in my future. Just not before the wedding.
If I do go down that road, however, I’ll have to re-jig some of the hardware we have lying around. I’ll need a capacious file server more than ever. And somewhere to work with a massive screen. I’m tired of fiddling about with only 1680×1050 on screen (I missed out on the high res screens and I would now love to have one of the 1920×1200 screens on this baby).
The MacBook Air, with only 1280×800 is a significant decrease in screen space but makes up for it with simple portability. Attach an external screen to it and you’ve got one really useful workstation. A laptop that is actually portable for once. And when you’re at a desk, a huge amount of real estate to play with – which is why I intend to leave a large screen or two at the local co-working place, should it progress.
It’s completely useless on long flights due to an non-user-replaceable battery. Not that many transatantic carriers have power-outs. Which means it’s not ideal for travelling at all.
Hyperbole. It lasts 4 hours which is, in my opinion, damn well long enough (considering I’ve never needed more than 1 battery).
End of the day, ‘travelling’ includes a lot more than transatlantic flights.