It's been a month and change since Apple released its new MacBook Air line, and since they were nice enough to hand me a review unit on my way out of the October 20 event, I've been using it every day.

I wouldn't say it's changed my concept of what a computer is, or revolutionized my life, or anything as lofty as that. It's a great little machine, though. And even with the reviews written and verdicts given and the television commercial running near-endlessly, people still have questions. I asked our 20,000 Twitter followers what they wanted to know, for example, and found plenty of things you're still curious about.

Which one to buy?

I'm using the 11.6-inch model with a 128GB of storage -- it retails for $1,199. This unit has the stock amount of RAM, 2GB, which comes soldered to the motherboard. So if you want more RAM, order the 4GB upgrade from Apple from another $100. I recommend this. My stock Air didn't feel sluggish with just 2GB of RAM, but the more the better.

If I were buying one tomorrow, I'd get this same one -- I like the 11-inch size and extreme portability, but I definitely need 128GB of storage over the entry-level's 64GB (more on that in a bit). I would bump up the RAM, though, for a total of $1,299.

Is the 11-inch screen too small?

That's of course subjective, but for me, the answer is no. The Air's 11.6-inch screen is the smallest I've ever used. It's only 5.75 inches high, and a hair over 10.1 inches wide. The top-to-bottom dimension feels the most limiting, and it did change the way I work a little bit.

For starters, I moved my Dock to the left side of the screen and set it to hide automatically (System Preferences > Dock). That frees up the whole screen for application windows, and I resized those to use all available space. I used the Command-Tab shortcut to cycle through applications, and if you're a ninja with Spaces that would help here too.

I didn't bother with Spaces, but did find myself using Exposé a lot more than usual, both Dock Exposé and the F11 keyboard shortcut. I don't mind having to press the Fn key while pressing F11 (otherwise it's just the volume-up button), but you can always remap Exposé to F5, since that function key doesn't do double-duty. Lion's improved full-screen application mode and Mission Control feature will make window management even easier, I imagine.

Adobe's Photoshop CS4 and InDesign CS4 -- which we use to create our pretty print magazine here at Mac|Life -- were both somewhat annoying to use on the 11-inch Air's screen, just because their interfaces have so many toolbars and palettes. If design applications like that are your bread and butter, you're probably not considering moving to a MacBook Air full-time anyhow. But I'm here to tell you it's possible. Just a little annoying.

One more note: The 11-inch Air's native resolution is 1366x768, which is pretty close to the 13-inch MacBook Pro's 1280x800 -- but of course the 13-inch Pro has more screen space for those pixels. So icons and type on the Air just look a little smaller, and I found myself bumping up text sizes in Outlook and Safari to compensate.

Does it have enough storage space?

Also subjective, and also for me, "Yes, it does." Again, I have the 128GB model. And as of this writing, I've got about 31GB of free space to work with. That's after installing Microsoft Office 2011, Adobe CS4, a couple of hefty games via Steam (Left 4 Dead 2 and Civilization V), my 7GB Dropbox folder (work stuff, mostly), 32GB of various files in the Documents folder, one really small (4 minute) iMovie project, and a 9.5GB chunk of media in the Music folder.

Obviously, you won't be able to keep everything on the Air. If you have gigs and gigs of photos, music, and videos, you'll do better to keep them stored elsewhere and just move them to the Air's built-in storage as needed. For example, I kept my main 300GB-plus iTunes library on my iMac at home, and used Home Sharing to move essential albums over to the Air over the network. That also let me purchase iPhone apps on the Air and get them back to the main iTunes library for syncing to my iPhone and iPad.

If you want the Air to be your only machine, and not just a portable companion to another Mac, be prepared to tether to an external drive for housing big media collections. You might consider using multiple iPhoto and iTunes libraries, one really small one on the local storage and a full collection on the external. Hold down Option while launching either iPhoto or iTunes to create a new library, and use the Preferences to point it at your external.

I was happy enough using Home Sharing for iTunes, and supplementing that with Pandora.com when away from my home network. And for photos, I bypassed iPhoto entirely, uploading right to Facebook and Flickr.com from my iPhone. Your mileage will vary -- serious photographers would want at least 13 inches of screen space for editing; most of the ones we know go for the largest screen they can get.

Will it play Civilization V?

I was surprised and pleased at the Air's gaming performance. I installed Steam and used that to download Left 4 Dead 2, and Sid Meier's Civilization V. Note that the Air doesn't officially meet the system requirements of either game.

Left 4 Dead 2 requires a 2GHz Core 2 Duo processor, and this Air's is just a 1.4GHz. But the Air's Nvidia Geforce 320M graphics chip is better than the bare minimum Nvidia 8600M required. When I plugged in a mouse and USB headset, the game fired up just fine and ran pretty smoothly. I saw some stuttering in online play, both in the audio and the video, it was still playable for the most part but not a flawless experience. But playing an offline single-player game was smooth sailing.

And Civilization V has even steeper requirements, asking for a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo and 2GB of RAM. Our Air meets the RAM requirements, but not the processor. Still, it downloaded from Steam, launched, and ran just fine. It defaulted all the Video Options to Low/Minimum (textures, the "fog of war," etc.), but I pumped them all back up to Medium and it still ran fine. Still, keep in mind that it isn't supported officially -- even though I didn't run into crashes or weirdness, I can't promise that you won't.

OnLive also ran fine, even though I was relying on Wi-Fi, which is still technically in beta. And OnLive is fully streaming -- you don't need to download the game to your Mac, as you do with Steam. So nothing is stored locally, which is perfect for the MacBook Air.

Games that require a disc in the drive can still be played if you have the $79 Apple MacBook Air SuperDrive, which connects to your Air via USB. I didn't have access to one of these. But Steam and OnLive gave me all the gaming I could handle.

How well does it stream video? Any fan noise?

I watched tons of streaming video on the Air, from Netflix.com, Hulu, Vimeo, you name it. And to answer this question, I still had to turn to iFixit's teardown to confirm, that yeah, this 11-inch Air does have a fan. It's a thin, tiny fan, like everything else inside the Air, but it's there. Well, I wouldn't have noticed.

Did you install Flash?

Yes, I did. Flash Player doesn't come preinstalled on the OS, so the first time you "need" it you'll be prompted to install it. I figured that most of our readers probably would, so I did too. Apple's battery life quote of about 5 hours was made with Flash installed, they said, and I found it to be pretty accurate in my experience. The MacBook Air feels cooler to the touch than my 15-inch Core i7 MacBook Pro, and I don't recall hearing that jet-engine-takeoff sound from the Air when a Flash video started to roll. So YouTube away, my friends.

Can it handle light music and video editing?

It sure can! I shot a four-minute video in HD with my iPhone 4, transferred it to the MacBook Air, and opened it up in iMovie '11, which worked just fine. In fact, it felt quicker and snappier than editing on my Pro -- very few beach-ball moments outside the initial clip loading. The Air's storage space will make it impractical for editing, say, a feature film, but for Flip videos, iPhone videos, those slick new iMovie trailers, you're fine. I did a little tinkering in GarageBand and also had no problems -- unless the 2-USB-port ceiling is a problem for you.

Did you have problems with the physical hardware?

I missed the backlit keyboard. Typing on the keyboard is great, and the trackpad is plenty large, but I just like computing in low light, and I missed the glow behind the keyboard. The speaker isn't so powerful, but that didn't bother me much.

I did miss the Ethernet port a few times. You can get a 10/100 USB Ethernet Adapter for $29, but I didn't. And I ran into a couple of instances (once at work, once in a hotel) where I really, sorely wanted to connect via Ethernet when Wi-Fi wasn't available or working right. Having 2 USB ports and nothing else (no FireWire, and the 11-inch Air doesn't have the SD card slot that's on the 13-incher) wasn't an issue. My external drive I use to back up my MacBook Pro with Time Machine uses FireWire 800, so I couldn't connect that to the Air, but I instead opted for cloud storage like Dropbox to keep important stuff backed up, rather than archiving every single thing.

One note about Dropbox: It was a breeze to keep all my work files synced and backed up. But it would have been smarter to go for a cloud-storage service that lets you archive files online without keeping a local copy synced. Dropbox keeps a version on your hard drive. So does iDisk. (Well, both can be used exclusively through their web interfaces without that local copy, but that's not how you'd typically do it.) SpiderOak will let you archive files to your online account (where they're available to all the other computers in your network) and then delete them from your machine, which is great for the MacBook Air because you can "save" without taking up local storage.

Has it replaced your iPad?

Honestly? Yeah. Poor iPad, between the one-two punch of my iPhone 4's superior Retina Display and the 11-inch MacBook Air besting it as a couch-bound Internet-and-entertainment machine, my iPad just doesn't get used as much anymore. I had been using it a lot to watch Netflix videos in my TV-less bedroom, but the MacBook Air's just as good as that, and doesn't need to be awkwardly propped up with a stand or pile of pillows.

As a Internet machine, the Air has made me see the appeal of netbooks -- you know, the category, not the actual netbooks themselves. Mobile Safari's all right, and it's fun to navigate by touch, so the iPad gets points for that. But it was so great to have a real keyboard, a full browser, easy uploading and downloading, true multitasking, and yes, plug-ins and extensions including Flash Player, in a small, light machine that feels like nothing on your lap and rarely needs to be plugged in. I get why people buy netbooks, and I'm glad Apple made a small Mac that can fit those use patterns and still be a Mac.

But my iPad isn't. I'll still use it for games and videos (and I'll come crawling back on that sad day when I have to relinquish this MacBook Air, which after all belongs to Apple), but the iPad can absolutely be replaced by the Air. If anyone is trying to decide between them, I'd say unless you really love iOS gaming, or you know you need something that will reliably go 8-10 hours between charges, choose the Air.