What MacBook Air is capable of?

For years through college I've been lifting an extremely heavy laptop (yes, that's what they call it, extremely). Now that I have a chance (and mostly money) to buy a new one, I'd like to try an ultrabook.

I've been considering other options as well such as Sony Vaio Pro 13 which I find to be made by mostly plastic and uncomfortable to type on, or Zenbook lineups from Asus which are unbelievably expensive. Now I'm trying to dive in into a mac world a little bit, and I would appreciate any answer to my questions regarding the capabilities of macbook air before I finally made the purchase:

1. I've been living in a totally Windows (or say Apple-less) environment. So if I'm getting a mac, it definitely need to have windows as well. The maximum storage in macbook air is 256 GB, how much we're actually getting? How much of a hard drive partition is considered enough for Windows itself? Is 256 GB is even enough at all?

2. Numerous reviews pointed out that the battery life of a new macbook air could reach up to 12 hours. Now I've seen the new macbook air, but I didn't stay 12 hours in the store to witness it myself. So if any of you own it, could you approve it? What's your experience so far? Would the battery equally as amazing if the macbook air runs windows since fully-charged?

3. What about games? I'm a less-hardcore gamer, I play mostly DOTA 2 for straight 2-3 hours a day. With a laptop that thin, does it get too hot while game? Any advice?

4. I have this feeling once you buy a mac, you ought (or at least you'd be tempted) to buy other Apple devices just for the sake of iCloud. Like a feeling that without those devices, your computer and your whole tech-savvy life would not be performing as well as it could be. Do you own any iDevices? What's your experience?

Sent from my PadFone 2 using Tapatalk 4

 

Ask yourself, do you need mac or do you need windows? That should answer your dilemma.

 

I need windows and I don't know if I ever need a mac. I am willing to bet $1000 for a macbook air to find out. That did not answer my dilemma as I never had any.

Sent from my PadFone 2 using Tapatalk 4

 

Most people that have Windows as dual boot use the 256GB model so this "should" be enough for you. It should be able to run DOTA just fine but as I don't play myself I can't what settings people used.
There are tests if you look around where the battery have lasted anywhere from 5-15hrs depending on what you do. If you want to check regarding games and battery time I suggest you look at Macrumors forum as it is for Mac only.

If you don't plan to do any new games or games with high requirements it will work perfect and you get the best of two worlds.

I have the 2013 MBA A's love it. It's my first MacBook A's worlds perfect for what I needed it for.

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk

 

If you *need* Windows, I don't see the point of moving to Apple and OSX (I'm assuming that you'll just install Windows over OSX or something). Driver support in Windows is pretty poor so I hear, which doesn't surprise me since the laptops and OS are optimized for each other.

1) You'll need about 20-30GB to install Windows on a computer. A 256GB SSD will get you around 222GB of actual capacity ( rMBP: What's your SSD's actual capacity? - MacRumors Forums), give or take.

2) Don't own a MBA, though if it's like any other modern laptop, you should expect it to be within spitting distance of advertised battery life (assuming light usage and such). Same can be said for modern Wintels, actually.

3) The MBA isn't really meant for gaming, and neither would any Wintel Ultrabook. ULV processors are considerably weaker than full-voltage processors for tasks more heavy than just the basic daily stuff. Not to mention that the MBA (and other Ultrabooks) typically only come with integrated graphics, so don't expect anywhere near the performance of your Alienware (I'm assuming that's what you have). As for Dota2 and the MBA, I found this: Dota 2 on the latest MacBook Air? : macgaming

4) You don't have to buy anything, really. It's just a computer... Anyway, I own an iPod touch and I don't think anything special about it. It's just a PDA/music player to me. Though I use Dropbox for my cloud needs, and even then I only bother to store school work on it since I'm not too comfortable putting up anything else to "the Cloud" for privacy reasons. But anyway, you can use whatever Cloud services you feel like using, not just iCloud.