im also a big fan of the ssd but they dont last long and can be costly

my m225 has slowed down a lot since new (2 years old, just) so i replaced it with an m4 which is even quicker. everything you do is quicker, not just the boot up

depending on your requirements you can have a 60gb for £60 roughly but in this day and age its not a lot of space, 128gb for £100+ model depending so they are expensive but imho well worth it

We had a 24" iMac in work, died. Sent to an Apple authorised do-dah, £890 to fix it! The PSU had died, taking the graphics card and the screen out with it. Never seen anything like that in over 15 years of tinkering with PCs.

SSD is fantastic. But only if you make it work for you. Thus if you open an application at 9am and don't close it, chances are you'll not get much out of it.

A good test if a little irksome to the apple store operatives, find a new air, open safari, then mash that apple +t till you've got rsi, I used all ram up, before: open finder, launch every app on the machine... swapping is now well into disk, is ssd, it's like ram, so even when swapping like crazy, the machine sort of keeps going, leave it with terminal full screen on top for maximum effect.

For me I now frequently quit my idle apps because they boot up almost as quick as alt tabbing, thus leaving me more resources to get work done and a side benefit of no noise/ interruptions till I'm ready for them.

Would I get another machine now without an ssd, I doubt it, but only require it for boot and app, generic storage I'd still go for capacity. I have almost 300Gb of virtual machines, it would be nice on a sad, but then I'd need a raid array etc ££££ The pro I brought a 60gb ssd for boot/apps only, sits under the optical drive (lose), getting the sata cable onto the motherboard is fiddly, but possible. I think I proclaimed that with the sad the pro has a another 4 years in it... graphics is the only issue, I want to run 4 screens, cards harder to come by / cost / power requirements.

For the air though, no optic is a pita at times, but it can borrow the pro's drive; another reason to keep old bigfoot around or a usb dvd caddy... no FW, very little.

Box comes with a usb software key for restores... only plan on doing that once, when I sell it.

I'm working away here on my 2011 Macbook Air in Windows. All the recent Macs are PCs and run Windows beautifully, either from within a Virtual Environment inside OSX or just alternative boot into Windows. It doesn't care. Yes, it's expensive, but show me something this well made with this spec from anyone else and I'll bet it's just as expensive or even more! Have you ever specced up a Dell? They're horrendously expensive.

If you prefer Windows to OSX, then fine, but the hardware is gorgeous and I've yet to see a pre-built Windows PC that's as well made or thought through.

Their is a very left field alternative a 'hackintosh'