Living Life On 64 Gigs & 11 Inches

Frank Chimero (13” Air), John Gruber (11” Air), Ben Brooks (13” Air), Patrick Rhone (11” Air), and now Steve Hackett (contemplating  11” Air) have all chimed in on this subject of living on less in the digital realm. I have some fairly extensive experience, and some insights into the subject, so I figured it’s about time I joined the conversation.

Background

First, a little background on me and why this is all relevant. I design and build websites for a living, in addition to designing logos, creating custom illustrations and graphics for the web, doing some print design, and blogging professionally on a part-time basis. So, I use my computer extremely heavily, all day, every day, and have pretty similar needs to most of the people chiming in on this subject.

History

My experiences with the MacBook Air began with the release of the original 64GB 13” MacBook Air a few years ago. This was the one with the 64GB 1.8” PATA hard drive, 2GB of RAM, and a 13” 1280 x 800 display. It was a fantastic little computer, and one I still have fond memories of to this day. The thing that eventually killed it for me was that iPod hard drive. It was just too darned slow at 4200 RPM with that tiny, spinning platter inside. Other than that, it was pretty much an awesome machine, and one I relied on. At that point in time, I picked up a 26” LCD to use with it so I could have some extra workspace, and also a USB hub  to give me 7 powered USB ports, more than just about any desktop computer. I also made use of 3 external 500GB hard drives, and a couple of external portable drives as well. I didn’t need to read optical discs, so I never bothered with the external optical drive.

Fast forward to today, and I recently sold my 2008 15” Unibody MacBook Pro that I’d upgraded to use a 120GB OCZ Agility II SSD and 8GB of RAM, and downsized substantially. The Mac I replaced it with is a base-level 11” 64GB MacBook Air with 2GB of RAM. Here’s the kicker. I have not noticed any noticeable speed decrease at all. I’m not running out of storage space. I almost never hear the fan (unless I’m playing flash video).

Media

The only noticeable downside to this Mac is that it really struggles to play full-HD video on an external display. This isn’t really an issue for me, since we have an Apple TV hooked up to our HDTV to use for that purpose, in addition to an iMac that acts as a media server (which also eliminates any media storage issues).

I could easily still get by without the media server and iMac. Nearly all our movies are SD, not HD, and it plays all of them beautifully. I already have them all stored on an external USB 2.0 hard drive, along with other hard drives for photos and music. (And seriously, who stores their media on an internal drive anyway? I haven’t in years, if ever.) That said, with things like iTunes Home Sharing, Pandora, Rdio, Spotify, and others, local music is an increasingly less essential thing to have. Netflix, Hulu, and iTunes Home Streaming all work together to make storing movies on the internal drive pointless as well, for anything but airline flights.

I use an excellent app called Instacast on iOS to stream my podcasts (where is the Mac version?) without downloading anything, which is fantastic. I also manually manage music on my iPod so I can keep different music on it than what’s on my Mac.

Daily Use

Here’s where we get down to why I bought this machine, and how I get along using it day to day.

I bought this Mac because I take my iPad 2 everywhere. I love it. However, it’s all but unusable for any serious work due, not so much to the iPad itself, but to a serious lack of innovation in App development on the iOS platform.  The iPad is perfectly capable of being one’s daily driver workhorse computing platform, but due to developers focusing so heavily on content consumption apps, and very little on content creation, there are almost no great iPad apps for people like me.

This is a subject for another day, but suffice it to say I really want to see some serious design and development apps on the iPad, the likes of CSSEdit, Coda, Espresso, Pixelmator, Acorn, Vector Designer, Flux, Transmit, and others, but built from the ground up for multitouch interaction. There’s no reason I should not be able to tap to place a CSS div, pinch out while dragging to size and position it, and tap and hold to set CSS attributes from a popover dialog, all the while viewing the page as it will look in WebKit, in real time. It should then support automatic sync via S3, DropBox, or SFTP. Anyway, that’s my dream and my rant.

Back to the Air. I did as many have done and immediately used the handy USB restore key Apple includes with the Air to wipe the storage and re-install a clean installation of OS X, without all the foreign languages, foreign fonts, printer crud, and iLife apps.

The following are the apps I installed that I use daily:

• DropBox - all my vital files are in here.
• Amazon S3 - not an app, but absolutely amazing. I use this bottomless and unbelievably affordable cloud storage to give me an infinite cloud drive to hold anything and everything my heart desires. It may soon dethrone DropBox for me. My last bill was .19 for a month. That’s nineteen cents. Combined with Jekyll and a few DNS tricks, I use this to host websites for next to nothing. It can hold 100 sites on one account for pennies a month. Insane.
• CSSEdit - an absolute must-have if you do any web design. I rely on this as my daily driver for CSS coding, which means most of every work day.
• Pixelmator - I hate Photoshop for it’s clutter, bloat, complexity, and obscene price. Let me make this clear. I’m not “getting by” or “making do” with Pixelmator. I’m in love with this app, and actively prefer it to the disaster that is Photoshop.
• Cyberduck - I like Transmit, but it has some issues with setting incorrect file types on S3 uploads, which is a deal breaker for me. Cyberduck handles S3 much better, and is free.
• NvALT (Notational Velocity / SimpleNote) -  Brett Terpstra’s app is fantastic, and I use it to sync notes to SimpleNote, which I use on my iPad and iPod touch to hold nearly anything I want to remember.
• Adobe Illustrator CS5 - I’ll get rid of this when I can find a viable alternative. Vector Designer is getting there, but still has some rough patches that need to be sorted out before it’ll dethrone Illustrator for me. Until then, it’s the best Illustration app around.
• TextMate - I use this with a collection of bundles. It’s great, and works together with CSSEdit to make my life as a web designer much more enjoyable and efficient.
• Visor - a fantastic complement to the Terminal in OS X, it gives you a universal popup terminal that slides out onto your screen from anywhere in the OS. I use S3cmd (command line S3 sync and management) and Jekyll (command line static site generator) exhaustively in my web work.
• MarsEdit - I’m typing this in MarsEdit right now. I use this to manage my blog, and all the blogs I contribute to, all from a single interface. It’s a fantastic, must-have app for anyone doing any sort of regular blogging. Seriously, go get it.
• Safari - my favorite browser. I also use Firefox Aurora & Chrome Canary, with a collection of extensions in each, LastPass and AdBlock are must-haves.
• Reeder - my daily RSS reeder. I love this app, but use the iPad version much more heavily. The Mac version is more for catching up throughout the day, while the iPad version is my go-to for news and blog reading.
• Gmail - together with some great Safari extensions, I use this in place of a local email client to save space. It’s a little-known fact that simply typing in your account credentials on Mail.app, or even Sparrow, kills between 5 and 15GB of drive space instantly due to local mail storage. Neither of those apps are particularly efficient, either. That said, I may use Sparrow eventually because I just love that app.

Screen Space

One thing almost nobody points out is that this 11” Air has more screen real estate than the 13” MacBook and MacBook Pro. It accomplishes this by using a much higher pixel density (DPI) than those other models, and by using a wider aspect ratio of 16:9 as opposed to the typical 16:10. This allows you to have more pixels on screen than either of those two 13” models, which is a pretty incredible feat. More importantly, because of this it truly does not feel like a 11” screen. In fact, without an actual 13” here to compare it to, it really does feel like I’m using a 13” MacBook Air. Only when you physically set a current 13” Air next to it does it begin to look smaller. For these reasons, I feel it makes for a fantastic portable computing experience.

I use my 26” desktop display when at my desk to look at things. I’m using my vintage 1989 IBM Model M Mini to type things, which has been loved and praisedfor  having the best key switch mechanics ever used in a keyboard. I also use  an Apple Wireless keyboard at other times. I use an Apple Magic Trackpad, Magic Mouse, and occasionally a Razer DeathAdder precision gaming mouse to point at things.

Conclusion

This thing is awesome. The bottom line is, the 11” MacBook Air is by far my favorite Mac I’ve ever owned, and I’ve owned a lot of Macs. It’s also the best designed Mac I’ve ever owned, and that’s saying a lot. It weighs far less than any Mac ever made as well, which is a fantastic feature in and of itself. Anyway, with all that stuff installed, I still have around 40GB free. I can open it, plug it in, and have a full desktop experience when I’m working, and then fold it up and take it with me as easily as a small book. It weighs almost nothing, and is so small and light, it seems to defy the laws of physics at times. I love it. It works. I’m happy.

And that, folks, is how I roll.