TheMysteriousStranger :
I'm looking for a laptop to replace my chromebook and I love everything about the macbook air except for the software.
You need to specify what exactly it is about the MBA that you like. No two laptops are alike, and every laptop involves some compromises between what you want and what you get. The MBA has its warts too - I assume you don't "love" that the screen is only 1366x768 or 1440x900, has poor color rendition, is glossy, components can't be upgraded, no touchscreen, lacks ports (without carrying around a thunderbolt dongle), and their sharp front edge can cut into your palms.
The big one for me is that it only has one mouse/trackpad button. Maybe it's because I play the piano, but I have no problem keeping track of different functions on lots of buttons on my mouse. A one-button mouse was a Steve Jobs eccentricity that needed to be retired a decade ago, just like his obsession with small phones and a single size tablet. People aren't as dumb as he thought they were.
Anyway, I don't mean to dis the MBA. It has a lot of great features and may be the perfect laptop for you - it all depends on what features you're looking for. For starters, which size MBA are you looking at and which features do you consider must-have, which would be nice to have, and which are unimportant to you?
Another advantage ultrabooks have is that while their list price may be the same or more than the Macbooks, they get discounted more heavily during sales and clearances. The Macs are pretty consistently reduced $50-$100 during a sale, $100-$150 when a new model is introduced. For PCs, $100-$200 during a sale, and $200-$500 during clearance is more typical.
ronintexas :
The advantage to a MAC is it utilizes the hardware better as compared to a PC, one example - you can do a lot in Photoshop on a MAC with 4GB of RAM - on a PC you would need 8GB RAM to do the same thing
That's highly unlikely to be the case. Photoshop's memory footprint is almost entirely determined by the size of the images you're editing and the undo history it keeps in memory. OS X does have a smaller memory footprint than Win 7/8, but unless you have a lot of crap loading itself in Windows (which is pretty likely compared to OS X), the OS should only be taking about half a GB.
More than likely, the reason PS "works" with 4GB on a Macbook is the Macbooks switched to SSDs earlier than most PC laptops. Having a SSD means you almost can't tell when the computer starts swapping because it's used up all available RAM. Intel requires all "ultrabooks" to have a SSD or they can't be called an ultrabook, so it's a moot point. If PS starts swapping on an ultrabook with 4 GB of RAM, you're hardly going to notice it. I actually ran that config myself for 6 months before finally bumping the laptop up to 8 GB. If it had been a HDD, I would've increased it to 8 GB the next day.
Where the Macs have the biggest advantage is with power drain (and thus battery life). Microsoft has to deal with thousands of different hardware configs, and billions of possible hardware combinations when it comes to desktops. They basically come up with one generic profile which works ok for most systems. Apple only has to deal with a half dozen hardware configs, so they can tune the OS power saving features a lot more precisely than Windows can. It's not unusual for a Macbook to have 1.5x-2x the idle battery life of a PC laptop with the same size battery, about 1.2x-1.5x the battery life with light use. (Under heavy use they are the same, or the Macs are even worse since they can get away with smaller batteries.)
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