Getting a Macbook Air in a couple weeks and need advice on moving to the smaller hard drive, specifically relating to iTunes and iOS devices.

Rock Steady: iTunes match won't work with a first-gen Apple TV. kdern: He's on the right track, though. My suggestion would be moving everything to the external drive, getting a next-gen AppleTV, and using iTunes Match to get to your music from Everywhere.

What is the rest of the 170GB? Seriously...if you eliminate media, OSX Lion is only a few gigs in size. I've had a MBA for about a month, using it _heavily_ (iMovie HD video editing of CES footage, Aperture library of all my video and audio of the show, the full Adobe Suite AND Microsoft Office) and I'm not even scratching 100GB. Oh, and 35 Gigs of that is my Dropbox full of docs and presentations. If you ID where the rest of your space is going, that's the first step. IMHO, iTunes Match is good enough that I'd upgrade to the Apple TV 2 to get it working.

Doesn't iTunes match download rather than stream? I don't understand how that helps me... can you explain? I listen to music constantly on multiple devices, and I also use iTunes for podcasts, tv and movies.

Why does half the iTunes library have to stay on the laptop? I'd start by moving the whole thing to an external drive. No puzzles about switching between libraries. That by itself gets you down below your target. This would mean to you'd have to carry an external drive around with you if you want to have iTunes available on the road. This is what I do [though not with a MBA, with a big ol' HP laptop]. I started doing it so I could share the same iTunes library between a MacBook and a Windows laptop. When I stopped carrying the Macbook around, I just kept up with the external drive. My desktop machine at home also has the iTunes library on an external drive, even though there's plenty of space on the internal drive. I'm also puzzled by where the space is going. Is that itemization on the right showing only the contents of the Users dir?

Chazlarson... Nope, that's the whole drive. I can't imagine plugging in an external drive every time I use my computer... I listen to music all the time and move my computer to different locations throughout the day.

I can post another screenshot if that would be helpful... tell me what directory I should post the inventory of.

This would mean to you'd have to carry an external drive around with you if you want to have iTunes available on the road. Or would you still have wifi/3G/etc access to your iTunes cloud? Isn't that the point of the cloud, to give you always-there access to stuff?

iTunes Match downloads, but only temporarily. If you have a decently fast internet connection, though, it fundamentally streams inasmuch as it can play while it downloads, and usually it doesn't keep the songs around for too long unless you manually download them first instead of just hitting "play"

The MBA has a 256 GB hard drive, and I figure I shouldn't go above about 75% capacity (190 GB). As I understand it, SSDs don't slow down/get messed up the same way that HDDs do when they get full. Of course you want to keep enough space to download stuff, but it shouldn't affect performance if your hard drive is relatively full.