OK, my background. Migrated my desktops from XP to Mac soon after the Bootcamp beta became available (although in fact have never needed to use it), but have used a Dell X1 for a couple of years which I absolutely love; the main reason being its lightness. I use it solely for playing movies when travelling (I rip my DVDs to the HDD and use Daemon Tools to mimic an optical drive rather than take the external drive with me), browsing, MS Office, and watching streamed video on my home network. I'm really struggling to think of anything fundamentally I find wrong with the X1, although its age is starting to show (screen starting to bleed slightly, and I'm not convinced the HDD has much life left).

I've been thinking recently of upgrading the laptop, but nothing else has really grabbed me. Could this new Mac be for me? Is there anything comparable in the Wintel sector I should be looking at instead? The only reservation I can see with the Air is the connectivity issue - some places I travel to I need to use wired ethernet or even sometimes (ugh) dial-up, so I'd need to carry separate USB adaptors for those.

Also, is it as easy to rip DVDs to a Mac as it is to a PC? I currently rip using a combination of DVD Decrypter and DVD Region+CSS (legitimate DVDs here in HK come with a variety of region encoding, so I need a way of "cracking").

Finally, I can't find any specs about the size of the Mac AC adaptor - again, one of the things I love about the Dell is that the adaptor is both tiny and feather-light.

Cheers all.