Will I become a MacBook Airhead?

Much has been said about the pros and cons of the MacBook Air. Lot of strong opinions are out there. I just thought I’d add my 2 cents to this as I’m starting to consider this be the replacement for my 3 year old 15" Powerbook G4.

My plan was to get one of the next generation MacBook Pro’s when they become available. But now I’m really becoming really tempted at the MBA instead.

Now, my 5 main activities on my computer is coding, browsing, email, music and IM (which includes twitter). I rarely do any kind of 3d graphics and never play any games, so I’m not too worried about 3D performance.

Looking at various benchmarks the MBA is already way faster than my PowerBook on almost everything except disk and opengl. Which sounds good to me.

The two areas that give me trouble performance wise right now is ruby performance both when doing local mongrel requests as well as rspec. Running a single pass of all our specs for Agree2 on my PB gives me:

Finished in 991.699454 seconds

My partners 2GHz Core MacBook Pro gives runs the same set of specs like this:

Finished in 105.491531 seconds

If I can get my rspec speed down to somewhere under 2 minutes I would be happy.

My biggest problem is the drive size. My iTunes library is about 100GB, so I would have to cut that well down. Maybe even down to around 20GB. My guess this should be doable. I wish iTunes would allow you to partition your music library.

I love the size of the MBA. I travel a lot and carry my PB out with me on client meetings all the time. The keyboard is nice and the screen perfectly adequate on the MBA.

All of this said if Apple releases a new MBP in the next month I’ll probably change my mind and go with the safe choice. My guess is I will have made a decision and ordered a MB by early March.