Quote:
Originally Posted by Hoj
I was originally looking to upgrade from my *dinosaur* Powerbook G4 from about 6 years ago. It's finally dying and I was looking to replace it with its current-day counterpart, a 15" MBP. Now lately I have been hearing very good reviews about the new MBAirs and have been considering getting a 13" MBA instead. I use it mainly for academic purposes, watch the odd movie, mess around the odd time on garageband etc. but really nothing graphic intensive (ie. no gaming). Would the MBA be good enough? I don't want to buy the Air and have it be semi-slow when I have a big presentation open with lots of pictures, referencing, literature, word, excel, internet and youtube all open and then have me regretting not buying the MBPro.
Thoughts?
|
If you can see yourself keeping the hard drive relatively managed I'd say you'll have no problem. The speed is quite shocking, although the MBP is still designed for more heavy lifting. What I would do in your situation is buy the Air and put it through the paces for week, really try to slaughter it with open applications and see how it does. If you find the performance unacceptable, return it within 14 days and get the pro. If you find it holds up well, enjoy the smaller footprint. That's what I did and within half a day I realized the pro wasn't even an option as the speed was more than I needed and the size was so nice.
Some pros and cons based off of what you've mentioned:
Pro:
It would be ideally sized for a lecture theater or campus life. You mentioned the 13", but give the 11" an honest look. It fits in a VERY small area. I can actually have it fully operational
below my iMac screen
Con:
- It has no dvd drive, so any movie watching you'll be doing will have to be from a usb stick or streamed. If you see yourself needing a disk drive you'll either need to buy the external drive from apple or have a machine that can handle it for you. That's been my one complaint as several times I've needed to make a disk image using my imac and then transfer over via dropbox or usb stick
- You mentioned garageband... I have a firewire interface for guitars and mics and sadly my air doesn't have a firewire port. I'm a little sad about that.