15" MBP + 24" Display or 13" MBP + 27" iMac?

I bought a 17" i5 2.53 MBP and while I love it to death, I'm spending more and more time at a desk and now with an iphone my laptop rarely leaves the house. So I'm thinking of selling it. My girlfriend currently has a 13" HP laptop that also rarely leaves the house so our choices are:

1. Sell the HP 13" & 17" MBP, buy a 27" iMac and 13" MBP. I would end up using the 13" a lot in bed at night, so I would have my hard drive on the 27" shared with it via 802.11n wifi. I've never done this before, but would be routinely accessing documents, mp3's, photo's, and downloaded tv shows. Would this work well or would it be noticeably slow and annoying? That would be a dealbreaker.

2. Sell the 17" MBP, buy a 15.4" i5 2.53 MBP and an HP ZR24W 1920x1200 IPS monitor. Pro's: All my files on the same computer, all the time. Cons: obviously 15.4" MBP not as powerful or upgradeable as 27" iMac.


If I understood correctly, Macs are not like PC's where everytime I plug in the monitor I have to go through a bunch of menu's to activate the display.. on mac's you just plug it in and the display works instantly/automatically right? No fiddling? Cost wise they'll be about the same buying on craiglist/kijiji.

But if appletv can stream 720p video from an iMac, should it not be possible for the Macbook to stream that same video from the iMac as well? I think I read that realistically one can expect transfer rates of 100mbit/sec on 802.11n which is 12.5Mb/sec. My average movie is usually only around 1 - 1.5 gigs which works out to 0.2Mb/sec.

I can't do the whole syncing thing, it would drive me nuts because I'd be switching from one to the other multiple times during a day, I would spend most of my time on the iMac but when on the laptop, in the kitchen or something.. I might want to stream some mp3s, or browse a recent photo album occasionally. I wouldn't want either to feel sluggish. The bulk would be documents (text, pdf, word, excel). I would create an alias on the Macbooks dock to a folder on the iMac with all my documents. Shouldn't that work flawlessly given the speeds of wi-fi?

If it helps we have no walls in our apartment, it's a loft with an open second floor. Bed is probably 20' away from desk where iMac would be, clear line of sight. Kitchen table and living room about the same distance but on the first floor, clear line of sight.

Why use dropbox? I'm still using the same wi-fi connection since I have wireless internet, but now I'm entering in two more variables which are likely to be much slower, my isp's internet connection, and dropbox's server. I use dropbox a lot and it's often slow because the site is slow.

If dropbox is acceptable, then why wouldn't sharing my drive via wi-fi through my 802.11n router be good? I think I'll start a new thread dealing with this question specifically because these answers don't really make any sense

alfmil said:

I haven't used a desktop computer since - well I can't remember it has been that long. However, after seeing the new MBA I am going to get a 27" iMac and an 11" MBA (although I am going to wait to see what the next iPad can do before I make the final determination). Have you considered the iMac/MBA combo?

I am actually curious to see how many laptop only people are going to reconsider a desktop with the introduction of the new MBA.

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i'd get the MBA if i was taking my laptop out of the house everyday, but it never leaves the house it just moves around from room to room so for us i'd rather save the money, get a more powerful cpu, upgradeable ram, better looking display colors, disc drive, etc.. ssd drive would be nice though but not at the cost of everything else. i haven't owned a desktop in 8 years, things change i guess