Note: off-topic and I'll move this into its own thread.
It is definitely a very nice computer. I've been looking for a lightweight 13" 3# laptop for some time.
My list of features was rather specific:
- approx. 3 pounds
- screen: 1440x900, 1600x900, or 3200x1800 resolution
(note: no 1920x1080... it is an awkward [just plain wrong] resolution for a 13" screen)
- keyboard: firm and backlit
- must have no optical drive
- high quality construction
- SSD
- OS X + Windows compatibility
- gig ethernet
- no discrete graphics (integrated only -- for battery life/heat/noise)
- sd card reader
- usb3
Although it was expensive, a lot of the PC laptops I was looking at were almost the same cost and in some cases even more. I bought the model with 256GB SSD, added upgrades i7-4650U, and 8GB RAM. I decided against the MacBookPro 13" mainly because of the screen resolution, which is only 1280x800. Even in the retina model it is an effective resolution of 1280x800 (pixels are doubled on a 2560x1600 native resolution panel). You can get other resolutions (1680x1050 or 1440x900) but these are scaled (not just doubled) and a bit blurry (to me). Having Haswell now and its efficiency advantage was a big reason too.
As far as the MacBook Air, everything on this laptop just works correctly. The fan is off most of the time and when it is on, it is very quiet and not annoying. The way the lid opens with a single finger is amazing (the indent and the right amount of resistance). The SSD on this thing is very fast 750GB/sec in blackmagic (no real world difference from my ProBook, but...). The ULV i7 outperforms my i3 on the Probook by quite a bit so it is a welcome performance boost. The trackpad is not perfect but certainly the best I've ever used.
The only thing that drives me crazy is the way Apple places the Control and Fn keys in the wrong spot. It is swapped with the Fn key, such that the Fn is where the Control key is and the Control key is where the Fn key is. I'll be changing that using KeyRemap4Macbook but I'm not sure how I'm going to accomplish the remap in Windows... hopefully I'll find a way.
So far, I haven't installed Windows, but I do have a couple versions of OS X on it... the one it came with and a newer one
We'll see. I already see one place where I have the trackpad driver for Synaptics wrong. "Dragging" via double-tap-hold works differently in that it works more like "Dragging" with "drag lock with a 1sec timeout." That is, you can double-tap-hold to start a drag, then lift up and start dragging again as long as it is within a second from lifting on the first drag. I will probably implement this in the Synaptics driver as it is handy to move things greater distance without always having drag lock or having to press a button to continue the drag. There's probably a few other things I'll learn too.
