Apple Users

I have both a MacBook Air and Mac Mini and I love them both. I had used MacBook and PowerBook Pros for a long time and wasn't sure I could deal with the smaller screens, but the light weight, low power consumption and quick starting (no hard drives to spin up) have made me a a diehard MacBook Air fan. I use my Mac Mini connected to two large displays to do graphic work and it's tied down to several external drives. If you don't need external displays or external drives, go with the MacBooK Air (13inch). If you do plan to hang a lot of stuff off of it and you need a little more horsepower, go for the mini. Consider the server version which gives you two hard drives. You loose the internal CD/DVD but I simply use a fairly cheap external CD/DVD burner for both my MacBook Air and my mini. I have found that I rarely use the CD/DVD except to archive data.

Also, a three year old MacBook shouldn't be giving you problems. I've purchased many Mac laptops over the years and only one ever stopped working (after being dropped on a tile floor). What kind of problems are you experiencing? I've found that regular use of good disk maintenance tools such as TechTool or Disk Warrior along with Apple's own Disk Utility have solved most of the problems I've ever had on my computers.