I am a PC user for last 18 years or so, but this year I bought my first Mac OS i.e. Mac Book Air 2013 model (Yeah I stepped on to the dark side), and since last one month or so I am using it as my main .net development machine.
To run Win8 on OS X, I use Parallels VM (got it for 90% discount through stacksocial.com), performance wise I do not have any issue, in fact performance is far superior to my last year’s Core i7 Dell XPS (8 gigs with hard disk) and battery life is phenomenal, around 10-11 hours.
I can simply drag and drop files in between OS X and Win 8 VM, Win8 boots up in no time, Visual Studio/Compile Time is not any different from what I seen before. Hardware wise it is by far the best device I have used (albeit screen ppi), around 11 hours of battery, buttery smooth performance (both windows 8 on VM and OS X), it is been a month and no matter how much I push the MBA, I have not heard the fan yet, not to mention that all of this is little over 1 Kilogram (~2 pounds).
Thanks to the haswell processor the MBP 13″ can run on battery for 12 hours, but with next OS X i.e. Mavericks, apple is making a few changes that will push the battery to probably more than 12 hours. As part of the massive changes they are making to the OS, what caught my eyes was the “App Nap” feature, this in my opinion is a dream come true. The “app nap” feature basically throttle down the apps that are not in the view.
I wish we had this feature out of the box in Windows OS as well, so many times there are widgets/tabs/screen that are not in the view but still compete for resources at equal priority.
Over all I am darn impressed with MacBook Air and looking forward to OS X Maverick.
Lastly, I have used Surface Pro and Macbook Air beats it pants down, the keyboard and trackpad on MBA is outstanding. I am loving my new .net development machine.
