Stuck between 13 inch Macbook Air and Macbook Pro

[georgehayward]

Hi guys,

I'm going to be buying a Macbook soon, I've slimmed it down to either the 13 inch Macbook Air or Macbook Pro (Non Retina). Whats attracting me more towards the Air is that it has a better battery life and is slimmer and lighter, which is useful as I will be traveling quite a lot. On the other hand, the Pro has a bigger internal hard drive and has a bit more juice, although I'm not planning on gaming or video editing on the laptop so I'm unsure of whether its a neccesity.

I'm planning to get the Macbook Air as of the time of writing this post, but if anyone can offer any advice for either choice it would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

George

[Splash]

Sounds like a clear cut case for the MBA to me. I've a 15" Pro Retina and it's great, but I picked it up for the power rather than portability.

[peterb]

Tricky!!

The MacBook air is very good, light and does pack quite a bit of performance, and the reduced internal storage can be overcome with external devices, either network connected, or USB. USB3 sticks are falling in price and a 32GB drive for data while out and about isn't that expensive.

[georgehayward]

Tricky!!

The MacBook air is very good, light and does pack quite a bit of performance, and the reduced internal storage can be overcome with external devices, either network connected, or USB. USB3 sticks are falling in price and a 32GB drive for data while out and about isn't that expensive.

That's what I was thinking Peter, I'll probably be buying an external hard drive for backup anyway, so I guess it makes sense to go with the Macbook air. I would consider the Macbook Pro w/ retina display which is slimmer and lighter than the normal Macbook, but that's out of my price range at the moment, unless I find some good deals in the boxing day sales. Thanks for the advice guys!

[Guy]

Personally I'd discount the non retina Macbook Pro completely. It's an obsolete design, hasn't been updated in quite a while and I'm surprised it's not been dropped yet.

Currently using daily a 13 inch Air and it's a fantastic device. Previous to that I had a 13 inch Retina, and next time round I'll be going back up to one as frankly I was spoilt by the screen!

[Jay]

Why not wait for the rMBA?

[Biscuit]

Macbook Air and a micro SD adaptor with a cheap 64GB card that fits flush into the slot (the slows are shallower than full size SD). There is a few of these adaptors kicking about, so do your research, but its a quick and cheap storage upgrade for macbooks

Don't worry about the extra oomph too much, if you don't think you will need it, you probably wont. I would get the extra 4GB RAM though, as its not an accessible upgrade

[georgehayward]

Not really bothered about a nicer screen, more about power, it would have a shorter battery life as well I would assume.

[MrRockliffe]

If you want battery life, some of the think pads offer 18 hours off a single charge (albeit with a bit of a big battery)

[Goobley]

I have the 13" MBA that I use amongst other things for game development, a fairly demanding process, it copes much better than I expected it too. I frequently end up at 15+ hours battery life if I'm just editing code and not actually running the game very often. I only went for the 128GB SSD, which does feel at little tight at times, but I'll almost certainly expand with a 32/64GB MicroSD as people mentioned above (although I'd probably be happy with only an extra 20GB of space so I'm glad I didn't go all the way to the next size - currently have 54GB free, but I'm being careful) . Also regarding the RAM, it might be worth the extra money, but I'm not sure. I am using 4GB and for OS X it seems fine. Yosemite seems to have really improved memory usage with compression etc. Right now I'm running 2 screens (so 512MB dedicate to VRAM), a good 20 tabs in Safari, Xcode with a large project and debugger, iTunes, vim (with 10+ docs), mail client , blender (with some simple 3D models) and I have 1 GB of RAM free.

A laptop like this I got to last me 3 years, I've had it 6 months and haven't hit it's limits yet. Yes, single-threaded execution is slow, even with turbo, but it's insanely light and the battery makes up for it. Especially as I often carry it to uni and use it all day - almost always without taking the charger.