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On a recent episode of The Talk Show, Gruber mentioned that he was considering getting an iMac to complement his newly purchased MacBook Air. As someone who has just done something similar purchasing a 13” Air followed by a 27” iMac, I cannot recommend it enough.

I have gone back and forth on whether to be a single or dual Mac person over the years. Up until 2008 I kept a Power Mac or Mac Pro under my desk and a portable in my bag to carry with me everywhere I went. Somewhere in 2008 I had my fill of the troubles maintaining a dual system setup bring with it and switched to having a high end 15” MacBook Pro connected to a cinema display and keyboard.

I wasn’t really planning to make a change from this setup anytime soon, but the allure of the 13” MacBook Air was too much to resist. If you do a spec comparison the 13” MacBook Air is not much different to the MacBook Pro that was on my desk: same Core 2 Duo processor¹, same screen resolution and same 4GB of RAM. If anything the biggest difference was the size and weight. I was more than willing to sacrifice 200MHz and an optical drive for something easier to carry with me.

I had intentions of replacing the MacBook Pro on my desk with the Air, but for a variety of outside factors I opted to purchase a 27” iMac instead. I have been leading the dual lifestyle now for several months and while it’s not perfect, it’s more than manageable.

A Much Improved Experience

What changed in the three years since I last had two Macs in commission? In a word, sync. It has dramatically improved over where it was before thanks mostly to Dropbox’s magical powers of awesomeness. iDisk has been a tease for almost a decade promising remote file storage you can share between your different Macs. In reality iDisk’s support in the Finder is just as lackluster in 10.6 Snow Leopard as it was in 10.3 Panther.²

With Dropbox, it is now ridiculously simple to drag a file into a folder in the Finder and be guaranteed that it would be accessible on any other Mac you installed Dropbox’s software on as well as the Web, a PC and any iOS device. Even better, I am able to use Dropbox to sync some of my most frequently used apps like 1Password and TextExpander to ensure that I have an up-to-date copy of each app’s database on each Mac.

MobileMe’s sync architecture has also improved. My Transmit favorites reliably sync between my two Macs now as does my Yojimbo junk drawer. Before it would be a daily exercise in visiting the MobileMe preference pane to reset my sync data.

Though the experience has improved, there are still gaps in the dual Mac experience. For one I don’t even attempt to sync my music, video or photo libraries between the two machines. The iMac is considered the main/media computer with its 2TB hard drive and is guaranteed to always be running in my office. iTunes Home Sharing and an Apple TV make it less of a hassle if I really want to listen to a song on my laptop while in another room, but generally it only bothers me when I travel and don’t have my library with me.

That also bites when traveling and wanting to sync new items to my iPhone or iPad. Don’t even think about it. Apple still restricts each device to only being able to sync to a single instance of iTunes. Whether this is a technical or contractual limitation is up for debate, but it is frustrating either way. Requiring these portable devices to be tethered to a PC or Mac feels so backwards. As with all things wrong with Apple, I can only hope that the mythical North Carolina Data Center will solve this problem and bring true cloud syncing to the iOS platform.

MobileMe is also a requirement if you care about using the native apps like AddressBook and iCal. SpanningSync or BusyCal can ease the pain with using Google Apps, but I have found it trying to sync with Google’s cloud services to be less reliable than MobileMe.³

Buying Advice

I am usually hesitant to give hardware buying advice because everyone has different needs, but if you do opt for the iMac to complement a MacBook Air, you absolutely must get the SSD option built-in. Once you use a with a solid state drive, it is hard to go back to the wait of spinning discs.

I keep most things that I want to be able to access quickly such as applications, settings and my Xcode projects on the SSD and set up a symbolic link that stores ~/Music, ~/Movies, and ~/Television to the HDD in the Mac.⁴ iTunes is a bit slower to launch compared to the other apps since it sometimes has to wait for the drive to spin up, but I am more than willing to accommodate waiting a few seconds for my music or video to play to have ridiculously fast launching of the other apps as well as quicker Xcode compiles.