Is a MacBook Air worth the price?

I was thinking of buying a MacBook Air 13" as an extra laptop but not right now and I wanted to know if anyone owns a current gen MacBook Air 13" and a competitor (e.g. the Asus Zenbook). Basically I want to know what makes a MacBook Air special right now and maybe when the next refresh comes.
I did go to the Apple store and messed with one but I would like impressions from someone who owns an ultrabook and a MBA.

Currently I own a lenovo Thinkpad X230t and a lenovo Thinkpad W530 with 1080P screen.

 

The MacBook Air is tops in the class. It should be, it defined it. Waiting to see if the X1 Carbon is a solid runner up.

 

this looks like a worthy competition. you get a better resolution IPS screen. just about as thin. better 1 gb gforce graphics. the graphics chip alone makes me consider it.

ASUS UX32VD-DB71 Zenbook 13.3" Ultrabook Computer

I have a 2012 mac air and this asus model really caught my eye.

 

I'm thinking of buying an ultrabook or MacBook Air when Haswell comes out. I'll guess for now I'll wait and see what Apple does for their next refresh.

Apple is the only manufacturer now that is using the 16:10 aspect ratio.

 

yes. . . . . .

 

There is going to be more ultrabook releasing. You should wait a little longer.

 

Problem with the UX32 is Asus crap build quality and poor drivers. Apart from feeling really flimsy and plasticky the fans are really loud and battery life is only good if you put it in the battery saving mode that makes even Youtube videos in 1080p unplayable. It won't switch itself to a higher mode if it senses it is needed, instead you have to manually change the power plan whenever you want to do something more than load webpages. As always with Asus, good on paper but but built cheap.

 

The MacBook Air is actually one of few Macs that is priced competitively against others and I think it is well worth it. I have the 2011 model but I looked at a series of ultrabooks from many different companies including Dell, Asus, Acer, HP (though their ultrabook wasn't really an ultrabook at the time) and a few others. The MBA was the only one that gave me what I wanted in terms of price, performance (the CPUs used in the MBA tend to score a little higher in the benchmarks than similar CPUs used by competitors), and build quality. I had a 13" MBP before that but wasn't dead set on staying in OS X, I was going to go with whatever model offered what I wanted. More and more have been coming out since then but not that many are able to match Apple's build quality. There is a big difference between a plastic ultrabook and one made out of unibody aluminum.

 

This is an incomplete question since you ignore the OS. I personally think OS X is just as much of a selling point as the great hardware is, and I'm willing to pay for both. I've been burned enough by Asus to ever consider them again, but even ignoring that OS X is one factor that they can't compete on.

The MacBook Air was refreshed in June, so it'll probably not be updated anytime soon. No one outside Cupertino knows though. Your best bet to follow rumor sites that have mastered the art of reading tea leaves.

 

I have not had much experience with Mac OS. Can you tell me what makes it unique?

 

The larger things you can read about in Apple's marketing, but for me it's also the many great, smaller details that seen as a whole make a big difference. Here's a few of them:

• Being able to drag and drop media/documents from anywhere to anywhere. In Mac OS X (or OS X as Apple calls it now), a window is basically a document and not a running program. This simple paradigm change is huge when you come from a Windows world. As a result of this, I practically never run any of my programs in a maximized or fullscreen state.
• Quick Look enables you to instantly see the contents of close to any file just by pressing Space on your keyboard. Space dismisses it again.
• Spotlight makes everything easy to find and can even be used to start programs (go for the 3rd party program called Alfred if you want more of this). The Spotlight framework finds things pretty much instantly and using the search in Mail.app is still crazy good compared to the abysmal experience in Outlook 2010 or 2011 (for Windows or Mac respectively and using an Exchange account).
• The lack of dialog boxes telling me that something is working (!). Microsoft did a good job making Windows 7 less talkative, but it still has dumb dialog boxes like the one telling me that I can now safely remove a USB-key.
• It comes with BSD userland tools. This might not mean anything to you, but for things like web development work it's very nice to be able to pop open a command console and type in some commands. It's a nice extra to have.
• There's no feature upsell to more expensive versions of the OS. If you want full disk encryption, you got it.

Basically, I'm just much more productive in OS X. My current setup is that I use OS X at work and OS X and Windows 7 at home (the latter is exclusively for gaming).

That said, it's probably something that you have to try yourself for a week or so. The transition away from Windows will be jarring, but I ultimately find it to be worth it.

 

What about the OS X dialog box that pops up if you yank a drive or usb stick without first ejecting it? OS X isn't perfect either.

I agree that you need to try things for yourself to decide. I don't think a week is enough time unless one of those days is a class so you can learn a whole lot in a short period of time.

 

The difference is that you're referring to an actual error, while I'm talking about messages telling me that my action succeeded or that an automatic process did what it was supposed to do (as is the case with Windows Update). There's a big difference between the two.

Agreed. I don't believe I said it was though?

A week obviously won't be enough for you to master everything about OS X, but it should be plenty time to allow you to make an informed buying opinion about whether or not you can live with OS X's idiosyncrasies.

 

You are correct. I said that.