I've owned the original 12" Powerbook G4, and the first-gen MacBook Air (no SSD). With both of those I ended up with some buyers remorse about six months later, feeling like I was making some huge performance tradeoffs for the portability that ended up biting me later on. The 12" G4 was just plain slow, while the first-gen Air was hamstrung with crappy GMA950 graphics and a really slow disk. From what I've read the SSD on the original Air was on an IDE interface
and wouldn't have made much of a difference anyway.
I bought the new 13" Air the week after launch and absolutely love it for a dev environment. XCode runs nice and smooth and it now seems to me that an SSD is nearly essential to make Eclipse feel usable.
We're coming up to the 6 month point where with those older laptops I would think "oh God why did I spend $1800 on this," and I still think this is the best computer I've ever owned.
I bought the new 13" Air the week after launch and absolutely love it for a dev environment. XCode runs nice and smooth and it now seems to me that an SSD is nearly essential to make Eclipse feel usable.
We're coming up to the 6 month point where with those older laptops I would think "oh God why did I spend $1800 on this," and I still think this is the best computer I've ever owned.