Since I got the MacBook Air, I’ve been using it as my exclusive laptop. The MacBook Pro has not even been disconnected from my 30” at the home office desk a single time. The joys, wonders, and more-than-adequate-for-real-work goodness of the Air is for a post in itself, though.

What has really surprised me is that having two Macs is not half the hassle I thought it would be. I remember back in the day when I still had my PC and I got a iBook what a pain it was to keep the two in reasonable sync. That scared me good from ever having two machines again.

But times have indeed changed. Here are the tools that keep me happy with two machines:

  • .Mac: It keeps my bookmarks, contacts, and keychain in constant sync. All happening in the background. Once you turn it on, you never think of it again. It just works.
  • IMAP: I’ve used IMAP in the past with varying levels of success, but for now it just seems to work. I’m using GMail and can now enjoy the same, synced inbox across the MBP, MBA, iPhone, and web access.
  • SVN: All my code for joy and profit lives in source repositories in the sky. So whatever I check in on one is available on the next machine I work on.

These three tools cover 95% of all my syncing needs and probably yours too. The only thing that I don’t yet have a good, automatic solution to is photos, music, and my desktop.

So far I haven’t been bothered enough to set up something techy like rsync and have just copied things back and forth by hand, but it would be nice to top it off with something here. A little disappointing that .Mac can’t cover these three bases too, but not a big deal.

So if you’re thinking of either getting a Mac Pro in addition to your laptop or an Air in addition to whatever, I’d say you at least shouldn’t think twice because of the trouble with keeping the two in sync.