I've always wanted to own a Mac but never have. I figured I could dip my toes in with an $899 Macbook Air. It's the current model with a 128gb SSD, 4gb of RAM (lame) but it claims to have over 12 hours of battery life.
This sounds like a good laptop. I read on a blog that Apple Macbooks last a longtime, so they seem worth it for users who care most about having a laptop with a long life.
With an SSD it had better be fast... But that low hard drive size means you're either going to need to invest in a much larger external hard drive or really limit yourself.
The 12 hour battery life is likely possible but it's going to depend on what you're doing with your laptop. I mean if you're on wifi watching a youtube video or streaming from netflix then it's going to suck back your battery power. (Screen on + wifi active + processor working + sound playing = lots of power used.) Plus other factors about how you've set up your system. I mean if you run your laptop at full brightness then that's going to use more power than if you run it at 60%.
(I know for my own laptop though I can't go above 55% brightness otherwise it's so bright it hurts my eyes.)
But if you're just using it for writing, light web surfing and whatnot... yeah I could see it hitting 10-11 hours without too much issue.
Personally, I would not buy anything apple. I find that their tech is overly expensive and under powered. I mean I bought an Asus laptop last year for $350 (including taxes mind you) that has a dual core 2.16ghz processor (boosts to 2.4ghz), 4GB ram, 500GB HDD, 15.6" screen, and it lasts around 4-5 hours on battery (depending on what I'm doing). To buy a similar laptop from apple, I'd have been in the $1,000 range easily.
To get something comparable to my gaming laptop I'd need to go over $2,000 (easily) and probably closer to $2,500. (I paid $1,700, taxes included, for my gaming laptop and that was in January 2014...)
But if you're happy with it and it fulfills what you need it to do... then don't let other's hate/dislike get to you. You're the one using it, not them.
I actually ended up exchanging it for an open box Macbook Pro 13" non-retina. It's a model from 2012 that Apple has continued to sell due to it's overwhelming popularity. It is better than the Air I had in every way except that it has an old fashioned hard drive and the screen is slightly lower res (although I found a program that scales it somehow so that it appears higher). The thing with this one is, it's the last model that is user serviceable. I can upgrade the RAM and hard drive without voiding the warranty. All other models if you open it up you void the warranty.
a laptop, an all-in-one desktop (touchscreen), a surface pro 1 128gb with keyboard, some more stuff I have to think, haha.
On another note, I upgraded the RAM on the Macbook Pro to 8gb and installed an SSD. It's super freaking fast now!! Safari loads in less than a second. When I had an SSD in a PC nothing loaded that fast.
