I bought it when there were no other ultrabooks around that had backlit keyboards and SSD Hard-drives. With the upgraded specs I could do my work on this machine and until now, I still do my work on this machine which are, Photo editing, Digital Painting, Vector Illustration, Web design, Animation and Music Production and recently 3D Scultping.
First thing I did to get my gaming started was to buy Parallels Desktop so I could play Terraria and Torchlight II, Then I installed Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3, after that I also installed Borderlands 2, Civilization V and Batman Arkham Asylum. A few months after that I got X-Com: Enemy Unknown, and Rayman Legends. In between my 3D gaming I also installed and uninstalled many Indie games.
My average daily playtime was 1.5 hours on top of my work. I did this for over a year until my Mac's battery died, It turned to red and would not charge anymore. If I removed my charger while my Mac was on it would just turn off right away. I would have removed my battery as I was playing but I could not remove the battery from a MacBook Air.
When you are playing on a MBA on battery, the fan turns on with heavy sound and It really heats up around the sides near the screen, Though it does not heat up the entire laptop. On full battery and playing Borderlands 2 in Medium graphics settings, MBA can last up to 1.5 hours when the battery was still healthy.
When I have alot of stuff going on with my work, the laptop also heats up pretty well specially when I am using it and it is also charging at the same time.
But even with Unity 2d games like Knights of Pen and Paper which I played often before the battery died, it still heats up quite abit.
So After I had my battery replaced It cost me 250USD and as much as I wanted to play on my mac I would not do it anymore. It just was not made for playing games for more than 30mins at a time.
I would say that after 3 years and 3 operating system upgrades later it is still in good shape and I have not noticed some slow-downs except for occasional crashes and system restarts (maybe once a month on the average) when using graphic applications, iMovie and Garageband.
On an additional note. The Charger or Power Adaptor almost died on me after 2 years. The cord almost broke and I had to hold it together with an electrical tape and a paper fastener. I am just going to use it until it dies which I hope will not happen in the next three years.
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