Macbook Air Or Macbook Pro 13"

Hey just wondering what peoples opinions are on the the new Macbook Air? I am considering buying a new laptop i wont use it much around home more for when i goto the GF house or on trips and vacations.

I dont know which to buy,

The base Model 13" Macbook Pro
or
The 13" Macbook air with 4gb Ram and 128GB Flash Drive

I currently am using a Late 09 base model Mac Mini with 2gb Ram.

My GF would like to be able to edit pictures Via Photoshop.

Is the Air gonna be able to handle this or is a Macbook Pro a Must, will it keep up with the Macmini I Currently have?


Storage Wise its not an isue as everything is save on Portable harddrives.


Whats your Take on it?

I use a 13" Macbook on the daily for both work and home use. Personally i would love to have an Air as they are insanely fast now that they use a Flash hard drive. I am unsure about using them for something as tasking as photoshop but i cannot see any problems myself. A Macbook pro would be plenty for anything like that. My Macbook currently has 500GB harddrive and 4GB RAM as i upgraded both myself which was insanely easy even though i had never done that before.

My opinion is that an Air is the way to go. Personally i would go with the larger hard drive though.

Cheers

ducati said:

I use a 13" Macbook on the daily for both work and home use. Personally i would love to have an Air as they are insanely fast now that they use a Flash hard drive. I am unsure about using them for something as tasking as photoshop but i cannot see any problems myself. A Macbook pro would be plenty for anything like that. My Macbook currently has 500GB harddrive and 4GB RAM as i upgraded both myself which was insanely easy even though i had never done that before.

My opinion is that an Air is the way to go. Personally i would go with the larger hard drive though.

Cheers

Click to expand...

Thanks for the opinion. To me the extra 300 dollars for 128 gb isnt worth it . My gf edits pictures and as soon as she is done it goes on her portable HD drive. So there really isnt a need for the size increase.

My mac mini has 150gb hard drive and even with a 30gb windows partition i still have 70gb free on the Mac side.

ducati said:

I use a 13" Macbook on the daily for both work and home use. Personally i would love to have an Air as they are insanely fast now that they use a Flash hard drive. I am unsure about using them for something as tasking as photoshop but i cannot see any problems myself. A Macbook pro would be plenty for anything like that. My Macbook currently has 500GB harddrive and 4GB RAM as i upgraded both myself which was insanely easy even though i had never done that before.

My opinion is that an Air is the way to go. Personally i would go with the larger hard drive though.

Cheers

Click to expand...

The flash memory is whats kinda swaying me over to the Macbook Air as this machine is the latest and greatest release from apple. Where as the 13" is coming to the end of its cycle and a new one should be released in april. Im almost thinking that they may even replace the 13" model with the 13" Macbook Air.

Sounds interesting, how much for the air? I'm in the same boat thinking of tossing this pos laptop for a new one.

EMANAARON said:

Thanks for the opinion. To me the extra 300 dollars for 128 gb isnt worth it . My gf edits pictures and as soon as she is done it goes on her portable HD drive. So there really isnt a need for the size increase.

My mac mini has 150gb hard drive and even with a 30gb windows partition i still have 70gb free on the Mac side.

Click to expand...

Understandable. I have a pile of movies and music on mine so even with 500GB i only have about 100GB free space. Looking to get a Mac mini to store movies and music on that would interact with my Apple TV but just have to pull the trigger.

The only thing to add is ask yourself what you want to do with your next machine. The Mac Book pro is fast more versitile and has a built in disc drive, with the air you will have to buy an external. Also the Pro is way more durable just some tid bits to think about. Also the air does not have built in ethernet as it uses a usb donggle for it.

gildp67 said:

The only thing to add is ask yourself what you want to do with your next machine. The Mac Book pro is fast more versitile and has a built in disc drive, with the air you will have to buy an external. Also the Pro is way more durable just some tid bits to think about. Also the air does not have built in ethernet as it uses a usb donggle for it.

Click to expand...

Disc drive is No issue in the year i have owned my Mac Mini i Havent once used the CD drive . Ethernet Jack no issue as well, and Firewire No issue. Basicly the macbook Pro and Air both have the Conections i Need.

As for the Macbook Pro being faster processor, Does the take into consideration the Flash memory that the Air has over the Pro.

Its a hard decision, more than anything i would like it to be capable of running Photoshop without issues.

Interesting.


"Yesterday, we noted some early benchmarks for Apple's newly-revamped MacBook Air models, comparing performance of the new machines to earlier generations of the MacBook Air, the current 13-inch MacBook Pro, and the iPad. The Geekbench benchmarks included in the report, however, only tested processor and memory performance, omitting any benefit that might be gained from the graphics hardware and flash storage used in the new models.




Macworld has now published a more thorough set of benchmarks, offering a somewhat more real-world assessment of overall performance using its Speedmark 6.5 benchmarking suite and examining all four standard configurations of the new MacBook Air. Among the most interesting observations made in the study is that the new 13-inch MacBook Air actually slightly outperforms the current-generation 13-inch MacBook Pro, a machine that offers a significantly faster 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo processor as compared to the MacBook Air's 1.86 GHz version. This comes despite the MacBook Air with its standard 2 GB of RAM being tested against the MacBook Pro with 4 GB of RAM.

The report also points to the significant improvement for the new 13-inch MacBook Air over the previous-generation models, particularly on processor-intensive tasks despite the older models offering equal or faster processors. Macworld attributes this difference to processor throttling imposed by Apple on the earlier models to deal with heat issues, something the company appears to have solved in the new models to allow the processors to run at closer to their full capacity.
When first released in 2008, the MacBook Air suffered from issues with heat, and Apple's approach to fixing the problem was to slow down the processor when things started to heat up, usually during processor intensive tasks. So even though you might have a 1.86GHz processor in your MacBook Air, it might be running much slower at times when you could really use the faster speed.

Looking at our benchmark results, it appears that these latest MacBook Air models (even with processor speeds that are slower than their predecessors) are running closer to their specified speeds, and therefore outperforming the "faster" processors that they replace.

Apple's 11-inch MacBook Air of course does not match the 13-inch model's performance in most areas, due to its slower 1.4 GHz processor, and of course neither machine is able to challenge the 15" MacBook Pro running a higher-end Core i5 processor, but the new 13-inch MacBook Air at least seems to be a worthy competitor to the 13-inch MacBook Pro, as well as the MacBook. "

I decided to go with the bse model 13" Macbook Pro