Ask HN: Shall I buy an 'ultrabook' or a MB Air?

Re:Ask HN: Shall I buy an 'ultrabook' or a MB Air? by kabr on Saturday January 28, 2012 @06:49AM (#3521880)

Keep in mind that the screen illuminates the keyboard in the dark, so a backlit keyboard may be more for aesthetics than functionality. I never use it on my MBA.

Something I don't like about the MacBook Air (13"): Dedicated audio in/out -- there's a "hybrid" jack which annoys me. I thought lack of firewire would be limiting for older drives and external interfaces, but I don't miss it. I do run Windows when I need it for (minor) updates to files in solid modeling programs such as SolidWorks and animation such as Maya while traveling with a VM. Works great.

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Re:Ask HN: Shall I buy an 'ultrabook' or a MB Air? by rayhano on Saturday January 28, 2012 @07:19AM (#3521919)

I have a very beautiful HP ProBook 5310m but find I have to tilt the screen down every now and then to see the keys (while trying not to disturb my wife watching soaps on the TV...)

How do you find the performance of Windows 7 on the MBA? Does it boot into Windows or do you use Parallels?

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Re:Ask HN: Shall I buy an 'ultrabook' or a MB Air? by benologist on Saturday January 28, 2012 @07:22AM (#3521928)

I do OSX + Win and OSX + Linux on Parallels most of the time, the only drawback with the Air is there's not enough ram and perhaps not quite enough cpu to do it all at once. A single VM runs fine though.

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Re:Ask HN: Shall I buy an 'ultrabook' or a MB Air? by rayhano on Saturday January 28, 2012 @07:36AM (#3521944)

Yes, the lack of upgrade-ability is always an Apple Mac fault, BUT the new ultrabooks will likely suffer the same limitations considering they are based on (slightly inferior) Apple-led Intel re-architecting of the PC innards.

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