I love my MacBook Air…and I know there are lots of Apple fan(boi)s out there…

But let me unpack

dav

So…it’s

• light
• well made
• battery lasts forever…9-10 hours just after a reboot.  I wait until the battery life drops below 5 hours, and then…*restart chrome*
• runs…100s of tabs in chrome…across 6 desktops.
• trackpad gestures.  Why can’t anybody else get this right?
• You open it…and it’s *there*.  Even on public / captive portal WiFi, by the time you put in your password, the captive portal popup is there and asking you to login.
• And the WiFi works better than other devices I’ve had…speed and stability.

Basically, it’s just a small computer that puts all it’s energy into being a thing you can work on, instead of…20-30% of its energy in annoying-the-hell-out-of-you.

On the downside:

• No builtin mobile data…which was so convenient on my windows laptop…having to carry around a MiFi or a dongle or use phone…but at least it just works, without intermittent disconnects.
• I was suprised to see that I plugged in a USB WiFi dongle…and…nothing?  Even Linux seems to usually work with even el-cheapo USB WiFi stuff.  Maybe I just *want* two WiFI interfaces?

And there are still Windows things that I need (or am forced to use).  Visual Studio is available for OS/X, but it is a completely different product from Windows VS.  This is my biggest regret — as VS has a lot of features and seems to be a swiss-army-chainsaw product for code / databases / cloud services / Azure / … and be endlessly extensible.

But running VS on Windows…is a combination of slooooooooow…and…suprise, it doesn’t work any more!

However, of late — I stuck my Windows laptop on my desk, on ethernet, and anything I need to run, I do via RDP.  And I actually prefer using windows from my MBA over RDP to using it on the machine itself.