I love my MacBook Air. My 2012 version is the second I have owned and it is hands down the best laptop I have ever used. Speed, size, weight, battery life are all great. But for some reason, lately I have been thinking that it is too heavy. Yes, the MacBook Air – more or less the thinest, lightest, laptop ever – is too heavy for me. In truth it is not just the Air. It is the Air (1.35kg) plus its charger (approx. 200g) plus the iPad Mini (300g) that I always carry, and the logitech keyboard for the Mini (just over 200g). That’s more than 2kg in total.

Then Apple launched their new iPad Air, which weighs in at just 469g (I’m guessing the charger is about 100g – 150g). Add a Logitech keyboard case at 330g for a total of just under 900g. It strikes me that this makes for a powerful combination of high-performance tablet which, with the addition of an external keyboard, will cover the vast majority of my daily computing needs on the go. All for half the weight of my current kit, but with double the battery life and a large screen retina display to boot. And all this for as little as €575, or about €800 if I go for 128GB.

Given that more of my life is spent in the cloud these days and, to my great dismay, the most intensive computing tasks I engage in are writing documents or creating presentations, then a new life on the road with an iPad Air starts to seem like a very attractive proposition.