With much preceding anticipation; I ordered the 2011 13 inch Macbook Air on the day of release. It was worth the wait.
I knew when I first powered it on that I mad the right choice, the boot time was vastly improved by the SSD (Solid State Drive) over my Macbook Pro. I chose to start new an only install the applications I needed as I needed them. This allowed me to clean things up and setup a new workflow.
The 128 GB drive was less than half that of my 320Gb in the Pro so I knew I could not move everything over. This meant not having all of my music or photos with me, 130GB combined. I started by installing the essentials: OmniFocus, Coda, Transmit, Perforce, Dropbox, Evernote, TextExpander, 1Password and Launchbar. Each one of these are daily use apps. Each one of them had a version Ready for Lion, which was a plus. The install process on OS X has always been easy, so this took little time.
As the Air came with OS X Lion installed and O planned on keeping it I took some time to explorer the changes. Some were subtle, like the change from Exposé to Mission Control. I used Exposé a lot for switching apps and getting an overview, Mission Control was a breeze. I really like the addition of full screen apps, I get distracted easily so being able to block out apps that I’m not working on is a big help. The only thing I don’t like about full screen apps is when I am using 2 monitors, the second one is just a grey background and not useable. While it took a bit to get used to the Natural Scrolling, I grew to like it.
I have used the Air for about a month now, and it has been good. I do not think I could go back to a larger laptop again after this. I thought the screen size might be too small but, the resolution allows for enough information to be on the screen there is minimal scrolling.
If you are looking for a new computer I highly recommend getting the 2001 Air
