It's been roughly a month since I got my MacBook Air. It's the 13" model with i7 processor and 256GB SSD drive. I am using this as my primary computer outside my day job.
During business hours I am a C# developer so I am pretty much tied in using Windows / Visual Studio for the most part of my working time. It's not that I complain, I actually like Windows 7 and find it a huge step into the right direction compared to both XP and Vista.
I have always been a heavy Windows and Linux (Red Hat and Ubuntu) user and have virtually zero experience in Mac OS X. And although I didn't anticipate any big problems, I was surprised how quickly I got used to the new environment and felt right at home in it.
In fact, it didn't really take long before catching myself trying to double-finger scroll (and in the 'wrong' direction) on my work's HP laptop touchpad. It was the same with trying to launch Mission Control and so on and so forth.
Mac OS X strikes me with how polished it feels when compared to Windows or Linux. How carefully every detail is crafted and well thought. And this is not limited to the operating system only. How do you remove a breakpoint in Xcode? You drag it outside of the sidebar. When you lift your finger, the breakpoint puffs out in a smoke cloud (with sound). I mean... you don't see this happening in Visual Studio anytime soon.
The machine feels really snappy. Boot time is around ten seconds and the shutdown takes even less. And by boot time I mean the time from when you hit the On button to the time you really can do something useful with the computer (like go to a web page or launch Xcode). Compare this to Windows, which is in a hurry to paint the desktop in front of you but then it takes another minute or so until it gets responsive and you really can do something.
There is only one thing to be said about the build quality. It's great. Period. Nothing else to see here, please move on. Thank you.
Xcode is a mixed bag. I like many things about it and I dislike many as well. At the same time I completely understand that many of the things in the latter category, I dislike simply because they lie outside of my zone of comfort. As a whole, it is a solid IDE, strange at some parts, but once you get used to it, it's OK. Again, this comes from a full-time Visual Studio user and Android enthusiast, so you should take it for what it's worth. If you ask me, I prefer Xcode to Eclipse. Did you ask? No? Uh, OK...
Cocoa / Objective-C: Weird at first if you are like me and come from a background in Java, C and C#. But once you complete the orientation tour, it actually stops feeling weird and I kinda like it. Seriously.
Conclusion: MacBook Air is a great computer that is a pure joy to use. Svelte, snappy and beautiful, I'm loving it.
