I'm pondering selling up my imac and macbook pro and just switching to an 11inch macbook air (w/1.8GHz i7) and an external display. Most of my computing needs are I/O limited so I don't think I'm going to be losing a whole lot.

But..

I play some, though not a lot, of games. So I'm wondering how a Macbook Air would cope with games like Minecraft, Portal 2 and so on. Anyone got any experience?

My Mid 2009 MacBook Pro 13" handled Portal 2 acceptably but I'm not a big old geek. I ran it at native Res (1280x800?) but with details turned down. It similarly handles TF2.

Note that Martyn's MBP has a much better integrated graphics than the Air does. Do not expect to play Portal 2 with any sort of decent performance. Maybe on absolute bottom, lowest res you can.

I have a late 2010 13" MBA. Portal 2 and l4d2 run at > 30fps on all low and on some maps low-med native res. Nothing close to 60fps and lots of dips. Lowering the res doesn't really help in l4d2

So the integrated graphics is a bit sucky, but the new models have 4GB of RAM and I was planning on paying extra to get the i7 processor. Would this not be enough to make the aforementioned games a bit more playable?

Skimming the ars technica review of it, it would seem that those would be helpful.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/08/thunder-in-the-air-ars-reviews-the-mid-2011-macbook-air.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4554/apples-11inch-macbook-air-core-i7-18ghz-review-update/3

I really wouldn't consider an average of 30 FPS acceptable at all. It would drive me nuts. You'd probably need to jack everything down really low and then maybe it would be acceptably smooth.

Is the Air durable? The ones I've touched felt like I could snap in half if I put in the effort, but I've been told they are "surprising strong."

I am looking for a capable, portable laptop too but I'm eyeing the Thinkpad X220.

Detty,

The MacBook Air is a great product but from what you want to do its not really going to be the right product. The MacBook 11" i7 we have been playing with it hasn't really impressed me too much. I like the idea of using it with a external monitor, but I really do think stick with what you have got or switch to 13" MacBook Pro and external monitor.

Were have you moved to in the midlands?

I don't think I could get by without a discrete graphics card anymore. At this point even the Visual Studio GUI benefits significantly from a more powerful GPU.