We picked up a new macbook pro 15 inch maxed to the tilt for a fellow at work and I was seriously torn looking at my non-ssd macbook air 13 inch. I waited until the apple store had the 11 inch on display, went in and banged hard on it with all the things (and more) I would normally do on my older 13 inch. The older 13 can handle it, but with some spinning wheels and delays when I’m going full out. The 11 handled it just fine so I took the plunge the next day and picked up the 27 inch led display and the smaller macbook air. Transferring my files took about an hour or so after installing dropbox and letting that do its thing, and after installing select programs – I’m a big believer in starting fresh every few years rather than using the migration assistant or cloning hard drives. All my media/photos are on other computers/drives so it’s really just documents and key files, which don’t take up more than a 3-5 gigs. Thank you cloud for email, google docs, wiki’s, delicious, etc.

The screen – beautiful, powers up on its own, instant on with the leds, goes to sleep quickly. The 11 inch is awesome – great size, cuts down weight by about 0.5 lbs and the screen is big enough for non-programming, normal or business user work. No complaints so far.

Size wise its a bit bigger then my ipad, and handles some of the computing tasks I can’t do on my casual use ipad.

This was an incremental change but lessons and new learnings:

• I found a utility called shiftit that maximizes windows the way some people want
• The 27-inch led acts as a secondary display and has automatic ambient light brightness adjustments. It didn’t feel right and for the life of me I couldn’t find a way to adjust it, until I found out you had to have the usb cable plugged in
• Plex has a nice new media manager that figures out and organizes your shows for you

I haven’t hooked up iphones/ipads yet, I’ll deal with that soon enough.