Well I finally got a Macbook Air. It arrived yesterday and I've pretty much set it all up. I also have my Mac Pro back online. It was down for a few days due to a dead ATI X1900 XT card. I was able to replace it with the ATI 2600 XT that comes standard with the newer Mac Pros. Slower in games than my older card, but at least there aren't rainbow lines showing up all over the screen as it slowly dies. More details for both soon... for now sleep ZZZZZZZZZ

UPDATE

So first, the story of my Mac Pro. For the last few months (actually closer to half a year) my Mac Pro started to display weird random rainbow dots and lines on my 30inch screen. After looking it up on the trusty ole IntraTubes via my pal Google, I found out that the ATI X1900 XT that originally came with my Mac Pro was notorious for dying a painful death at the hands of Heat and random rainbow pixel gremlins. The screen corruption was "livable" for a long while since I could still work and it hadn't affected my use of the Mac Pro much... until the last month. I increasingly saw more screen corruption and full-on crashes of OSX. The stupid video card didn't even have the courtesy of throwing me a Kernel Panic, it just froze the box. As of earlier this week, my Mac Pro was totally dead. Well, not really... it could boot up; but it froze after about 5 minutes each time. I don't know about you, but my computing sessions tend to last just a wee bit longer than 5 minutes. No matter how much I cleaned the dust out of the Comp, cleaned the video card's fan, or knocked on wood (or in my case Ikea closet faux wood), the box wouldn't last more than 5 minutes in Leopard. At 3AM the other night, I went ahead and ordered the ATI 2600 XT which is a somewhat slower card, but would drive my 30inch fine. It should be enough for my Aperture, Photoshop, Final Cut Pro needs. Ever since I got an XBox 360 I haven't even played any games on the Mac Pro anyway so no need for the nVidia 8800 which wouldn't work on my older Mac Pro anyway (EFI 64bit issues - nVidia said they would have an upgrade version "soon" that would be compatible).

In the meantime my MacBook Air was on its way (my birthday was a few days ago). As I tracked it on my iPhone, I was out both a main computer to work on and a laptop. I just used my wife's PowerBook G4 and my iPhone to satiate my email/web-surfing addiction for a few days.

Eventually both arrived on the same day. I mostly setup my MacBook Air while at work and installed my ATI 2600 XT once I got home (and after the usual kissing/greeting session with Ricky our chihuahua). I had to hurry because we were going to leave soon for our usual stay at the in-laws for the remainder of the week and didn't want to leave late. I stayed long enough to get the Mac Pro running with the new video card... which it did without any screen corruption nor hiccups. When I get back to the apartment, I'll run the usual battery of tests/fixes for all of my connected drives using Disk Utility, Cocktail, and Disk Warrior just to be sure the main machine is alright. So far so good though (for the half hour I had to see it up and running). I also used that time to transfer some of my personal documents (resume, parallels image, site/blog files, RapidWeaver extensions, etc.) over to my MacBook Air.

From now on I can divvy the work between my comps this way:

Mac Pro:
Video Editing and Composite work - Final Cut Studio
Primary Photo Editing/Storage - Aperture, Photoshop
Primary Mail Storage - Local copies in Mail
General Document work - iWork
Media Library - iTunes extensive Music/Video library connected to AppleTV

MacBook Air:
On the Go Photo work - Aperture, Photoshop
On the Go Mail reading - along with iPhone
General Web Surfing
iPhone Application development - XCode 3.1 and iPhone SDK b2
Web Development - DreamWeaver, Flash, Photoshop
Blog updating - RapidWeaver
Windows work for NBC - VMWare VPN access and MSNBC/CNBC.com updates in Workbench
General Document work - iWork

So my MacBook Air is the 1.8Ghz 64GB SSD model. At first I was really wary about the space available. After perusing the net's many hints on what to do with the limited space, I followed the instructions here to re-install OSX minus a few unneeded items (iDVD, iMovie, iPhoto, Garage Band, Languages, etc.). Then I proceeded to install specific needed software like:
DreamWeaver CS3
Photoshop CS3
Flash CS3
Flash Encoder
Aperture
XCode Developer Tools
iPhone SDK beta2
RapidWeaver and extensions
Firefox (with Firebug, YSlow, FireCookies)
iWork with Pages, Keynote, Numbers
I kept iTunes
VMWare Fusion and a CNBC Core Image of WindowsXP
Office 2003 for Windows
Workbench for Windows (CNBC.com/MSNBC.com CMS)
NBC Universal and CNBC standard installs for Windows (iNews, etc.)
A few small utilities and codecs (DiVX, Flip4Mac, HueyPro, Cocktail, DiskInventoryX)

Along with a subset of my NBC Work documents and personal documents.

This left me with.... 30.77GB free out of a useable 55.58GB (don't believe the market-speak 64GB figure. Even the 1024Kb conversion doesn't match 55GB, so caveat emptor). That's MORE THAN HALF of my SSD drive free with all the apps I'll need for real work.

I think the key to my successful use of space on the Macbook Air is the lack of my iTunes media library, big games, and careful choice of Apps (Garage Band's Loops are huge and I would RARELY use it outside of my Mac Pro).

The reason I can leave my Media (iTunes Music, Videos, Podcasts - I LOVE This Week in Tech and GeekBrief.TV) is because I have the iPhone taking care of most of my media needs. If I really want to transfer something over to the MacBook Air, I still can, but on a case-by-case usage basis. This above anything else probably will help my MacBook Air stay a lean mean machine.

So far I'm really really really loving my MacBook Air.

Tags: apple, mac, macbook air, macpro, macintel