My personal experience with the iPad Air + keyboard is the same plus it weights more or similar than the MacBooc Air! The keyboard is really bulky. When I travel I use the device as a second monitor though...
The MacBook Air is an alternative to the MacBook Pro not another device being wedged between the iPad and MackBook Pro. I carry both an iPad and MBA sometimes. Together they have a pretty nice mix of functionality and weigh less than the MacBook Pro. I actually use the iPad as kind of a secondary display sometimes while using the MBA. I suppose my point is there's no reason light/ultra-portable has to be the exclusive domain of the iPad. Lots of people who have zero interest in the iPad want a light/ultra-portable laptop instead.
The Air lacks the all-important keyboard backlight. That alone makes the MBP the winner in my book. There's also the fact that if you want to do something requiring more RAM and/or CPU, it also has a performance edge.
The MacBook Air is better for sure, and if you only buy one, buy that one -- full stop.
But I use both, every day, at the same time. They are designed to work together. With universal control, my iPad sits next to my screen at work, and I do some things on the iPad, some on the MacBook. I also use my iPad on its own around the house. It's also incredibly nice for CAD work (Shapr3d) and photo processing (Lightroom).
The iPad is much more resilient to water, food, and dust. I design things in Shapr3d on the iPad and take the iPad to the garage to build them -- a little sawdust does not hurt it and it's easy to clean. It's also much better if you want to read while eating, especially with kids around. The keyboard doesn't get in the way and spilled water won't hurt it either. I use it while cooking and to watch TV while washing dishes.
The other thing the iPad can do that the MBA can't is that it's easily shareable. If you work with others, it's easy to pull up a PDF on an iPad and hand it to someone to look at or even annotate with the pencil. There is no awkward standing over your shoulder or handing off a laptop. Everyone instantly knows how to work with you on the iPad, and to review whatever you want them to review and hand it back.
Overall I still use my MacBook Air more, and it's more capable. You can't do serious coding or development work on the iPad, for example. But it's very much worth having the iPad as well, at least for me.
If you buy the MacBook I recommend you try the keyboard first. I find it absolutely awful to type on. The specs are also pretty poor. I'd opt for a Macbook Air perhaps?
The whole point of the Air is that it doesn't weigh very much. It weighs the same as a netbook but is much more powerful.
Look at it this way: a 13" Macbook Pro weighs a whopping 50% more and all you get is a CPU that's a little faster, bigger harddrive and an optical drive, which many people don't need. I don't think I've used the optical drive in my MBP 13" for anything other than the OS X system disk once or twice.
You can make the iMac or the heavy MacBooks more powerful, but they will still won't be as portable as the Air.
Is the extra portability worth it with the Air? I still have a chunky 15" MBP with 16GB RAM (despite supposedly being limited to 8) but it's relatively heavy in the backpack.
I own a lenovo X1, which I don't think it's a direct competitor of the Mac Air, but it's light enough, the keyboard is really really good, and Linux works out of the box.
The Air is only slightly thinner and 0.25 lb lighter than the 13” Pro. I’ve had an Air since 2012 and just compared the two, and got the Pro. There’s essentially no difference in portability. But there are significant differences in capability and price.
I think Apple killed the 12” MacBook because for most people, an iPad is a better ultraportable than a laptop. The folks who are really adamant about laptops with Mac OS are developers, and the MacBook had a bad ratio of cost to power for most devs.
That's maybe not a great comparison, it's a different class of product with worse battery life and much heavier. The MacBook Air has been optimised for a different use case.
The MacBook Air is "superior" in two objective specs: speed & price. That's honestly it, and it's not even that much faster. It also has more ports & a more traditional keyboard/trackpad, but those are subjective differences.
The two people I know with them can barely tell the difference between the Air keyboard and their MacBook keyboard, didn't realize the Force Touch trackpad wasn't a physical click, and only ever plug their computer into a charger or a projector which required an adapter on the Air anyways.
The MacBook blows the Air out of the water in every other way. Design, weight, thickness it's not even a contest. The screen is orders of magnitude better. Battery life is better, sleep/wake response is better, power draw is lower, charging is faster.
Except the MacBook Air doesn’t have better specs than the iPad Pro. iPad processors have benchmarked comparably to laptop x86 processors for a while now. The iPad has a display which is around the same size but higher-resolution, 120Hz, and with support for touch and the pencil. Storage options are comparable. And the iPad has other random hardware like LTE, better cameras, and now LIDAR. On the other side, the MacBook does have more RAM, more ports, and a larger trackpad. But that’s not enough to call it a clear winner in specs.
I think weight wise MacBook Air is not much lighter than MacBook Pro 13". But it is about 500 dollar cheaper than MBP with newer 8th gen processor. I guess will wait until MBA gets cheaper or cheaper MBPs get new processor and keyboard.
In addition to the OP's question, if you are moving from an Air to the Macbook, I would especially love to hear direct comparisons. I was very tempted to get the new Macbook, but couldn't justify it given that the 13-inch Air was substantially faster and not much heavier/thicker...and the Retina screen isn't a huge deal to me for on-the-road work.
I ultimately didn't buy anything because I already have a 15-in Retina pro, and on further reflection, it didn't seem that much thicker than the Air...so I just replaced my stolen iPad instead.
Among the apple products, the 11" air seems like a oddball option to me. Two things
1. For people who say it is like an iPad with a keyboard, I find that the iOS apps I use (games, camera, touch based things) are very different than those on the MBA (Developer tools + Adobe stuff). So not sure what the connection to the iPad is. It is not even touch enabled. How can you say you are getting an iPad/Tablet experience without touch??
2. I find the 11" pretty cramped (keyboard space and screen size) to be honest. Especially if you spend more than a few minutes working. Looks like you find it too, given you have to put in additional paraphernalia (keyboards, external disks etc.) to make it work. It also has a much poorer battery life compared to the 13" counterpart.
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