In preparation for my New York adventure, I replaced my MacBook Pro 15″ from work with a MacBook Air 13″. I went for the entry-level model, which I also have been recommending to anybody who asked me what laptop they should buy. So I went to the Apple Store and told the guy in blue that I wanted the basic 13″ Air.¹

Ten minutes later, I joined my friend Derk for a cappuccino in a coffeeshop. I unboxed my new Air and wanted to set it up. And only then did I realize how ridiculous it was to set up a new machine offline.

It’s all in the cloud

With everything moving to the cloud, there was not much I could set up without Internet access:

• Files? Connect my Dropbox.
• Calendar, Contacts, and other things-that-live-inside-of-apps: Sign into iCloud.
• Apps? Load purchases from the Mac App Store, plus directly from the creators.
• Music etc? Load from the iTunes Store.
• Mail: Set up IMAP account.

This trend of ever more stuff moving into the cloud is also why I chose the small model with “just” 128 GB of storage. While today my music and movies take up most of my space, I am guessing that in a year or two even I will be streaming music with Spotify or Rdio or using iTunes Match. Let’s see how this pans out.

(In the end, I actually did none of the steps above, and instead just left everything to the Migration Assistant. D’uh.)

Impressions and expectations

After working on the Air for a few minutes, the first thing I noticed when switching back to the MacBook Pro was that the Pro’s display felt grainy. Now, while the Air’s display isn’t quite Retina, at least I don’t get this feeling of ugliness that I am already getting with the non-Retina iPads.

This is my first computer with an SSD, and I am curious to what extent it relativizes having only half the RAM and—nominally—just over half the processor speed of my MacBook Pro.