Should I Get the New Air!? Advice Please!

[JamonBull]

I'm a teacher. I need portability. Always running between classes and quickly setting up my Mac to project Keynote presentations for high school history lessons. I love the MacBook Air and always have, it's the perfect computer for me. I currently have a high end Rev C MacBook Air and am considering selling it on eBay for the new high end 13.3" MacBook Air. But I'm torn, and I'm worried the negatives are a deal breaker...

Positives
Glass trackpad (finally)
High res display (will be a pleasure to use, I can already tell)
Two USB ports on either side of Mac (fantastic idea)
Great graphics card for this class of computer
Stereo speakers (been waiting a long time for this, music will sound fantastic!)
FaceTime camera (my whole family has iPhone 4's)
Lighter
Thinner

Negatives
No backlit keyboard (I often plan lessons late at night, bad move Apple)
No infra red (I use the Apple remote in the class room all day with Keynote)

So as you can see, i know my two negatives wouldn't be a deal breaker for many people, but in my circumstances, well lets just say this is the first time Apple have ever revised a product and made me think they have taken a step forwards and backwards all at the same time. The Air essentially is for business consumers and people wanting to offer presentations in an efficient and effective way, without the fuss of carrying around a weighty MacBook Pro. What the hell is the point of taking out infra red? How else am I meant to operate Keynote? Is there such a thing as an Apple bluetooth remote?! And as for taking out the backlit keyboard, that was one of the sexiest things about the old Airs! They lit up keyboard was jaw dropping and gorgeous! Money isn't an issue so don't take that into account. I love having the latest Apple products but for the first time am completely torn. Advice please!

 

[Phycoduck]

Has all Apple laptops have FaceTime Camera's????

I'm looking at the Bench mark results for all new Macbook Air's.... and they can be slower then SSD based laptops.

The one advantage over the new machine is the RAM increase.... Do you need more then 2GB of RAM?

You could upgrade your drive to a RunCore..... if you had not already.

That will boost the speed for less price for a new machine.

 

[re2st]

Negatives
No infra red (I use the Apple remote in the class room all day with Keynote)

You can use various mouse/controller/remote apps on iPhone

 

[amoayeri]

Ars Technica posted some benchmarks for 11.6 MBA SSD.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/guides/2010/10/116-macbook-air-ars-answers-your-burning-questions.ars/2

Using X-Bench, we saw the 128GB model—the APPLE SSD TS128C—give the following numbers:

Seq Uncached Write: 134MB/sec (4k blocks)
Seq Uncached Write: 158MB/sec (256k blocks)
Seq Uncached Read: 68.5MB/sec (4k blocks)
Seq Uncached Read: 165.8 MB/sec (256k blocks)

Random Uncached Write: 32.18MB/sec (4k)
Random Uncached Write: 116.5 (256k)
Random Uncached Read: 8.27 (4k)
Random Uncached Read: 108.56 (256k)

 

[sweetice2007]

In terms of performance they are fantastic! The flash drive REALLY makes all the difference. Hell garage band boots up in a few seconds its so frickin quick and even iPhoto runs so smoothly and iMovie - all the iLife 11 apps. The speakers work amazingly well and this is all on the 11" MacBook air! You wouldn't even know your running a machine that's 1.4ghz I'm not even kidding. I wasn't so sure about the new release but I test driven one in our local store yesterday.

Absoloutely amazed by the machine seriously.

Worth the buy if your after portability but yes backlit keyboard is a shame and so is infrared but surely there's an app or something if you have anipod touch or iPhone to control your presentations etc? Worth a look if you have one.

I would defo recommend it for your uses!