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Old 08-10-2011, 12:56 PM   #197
Rathji
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Russic View Post
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.
I am not a mac guy, so I might be out to lunch, but couldnt you just share out the dvd drive to the network and mount it on the macbook?
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