Hi all,
First time poster but long time reader here. Apologies in advance for the long post.
I'm having a really difficult time choosing a new MacBook.
Currently I have two systems:
Home:
21.5-inch iMac (Late 2009) with a Core 2 Duo E7600, 4GB Ram, 1TB HDD.
Work:
13-inch MacBook Pro (Mid 2009) with a Core 2 Duo P8700, 8GB Ram (installed earlier this year) and a 250GB HDD (non SSD).
Uses:
Ideally I'd like to purchase a new MacBook to use at home and at work. I'd continue to use an external 22" monitor at work and will also likely purchase a 27" monitor to use at home.
At this stage I'm considering either the 13-inch MacBook Air (with the i7, 8GB Ram and 512GB SSD) or the 15-inch MacBook Pro Retina (with the 2.6, 16GB and 512GB SSD). I really love the portability and design of the Air but it doesn't provide the option of a quad core CPU or 16GB Ram. Additionally, the fact that it doesn't contain a dedicated graphics card concerns me as I will almost always have it connected to an external monitor.
The 15-inch Retina looks like a great machine, however it is obviously a lot more expensive than the Air. I'm also very concerned about all of the complaints regarding the image retention problem as well as the fact that a lot of applications/websites aren't retina compatible yet. I don't want to buy a Retina display machine if I will be constantly frustrated that my existing applications (particularly my FX trading software which runs on my Windows 7 VM) look blurry - it kind of defeats the purpose of having the retina display.
Another option I have considered is to purchase an SSD for my current MacBook Pro as a temporary solution and wait for the 2013 Haswell upgrades for the MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. However, if the new machines are released in June/July I wouldn't purchase until December/January as I like to wait until all issues are ironed out.
As you can see I am quite unsure about what I should do and would really appreciate any advice.
Thanks very much.
First time poster but long time reader here. Apologies in advance for the long post.
I'm having a really difficult time choosing a new MacBook.
Currently I have two systems:
Home:
21.5-inch iMac (Late 2009) with a Core 2 Duo E7600, 4GB Ram, 1TB HDD.
Work:
13-inch MacBook Pro (Mid 2009) with a Core 2 Duo P8700, 8GB Ram (installed earlier this year) and a 250GB HDD (non SSD).
Uses:
- I don't do any gaming
- I don't do any video editing however I do sometimes use Adobe applications (particularly Photoshop)
- I work as an IT Professional so I use my MacBook Pro for web browsing, email, software development (using Eclipse, XCode etc. with application servers such as Glassfish) and documents/spreadsheets. It is almost always connected to an external 22" monitor.
- I use a Windows 7 Virtual Machine (using VMware Fusion) on both systems for FX trading. At the moment the iMac really struggles with this due to only having 4GB of RAM.
Ideally I'd like to purchase a new MacBook to use at home and at work. I'd continue to use an external 22" monitor at work and will also likely purchase a 27" monitor to use at home.
At this stage I'm considering either the 13-inch MacBook Air (with the i7, 8GB Ram and 512GB SSD) or the 15-inch MacBook Pro Retina (with the 2.6, 16GB and 512GB SSD). I really love the portability and design of the Air but it doesn't provide the option of a quad core CPU or 16GB Ram. Additionally, the fact that it doesn't contain a dedicated graphics card concerns me as I will almost always have it connected to an external monitor.
The 15-inch Retina looks like a great machine, however it is obviously a lot more expensive than the Air. I'm also very concerned about all of the complaints regarding the image retention problem as well as the fact that a lot of applications/websites aren't retina compatible yet. I don't want to buy a Retina display machine if I will be constantly frustrated that my existing applications (particularly my FX trading software which runs on my Windows 7 VM) look blurry - it kind of defeats the purpose of having the retina display.
Another option I have considered is to purchase an SSD for my current MacBook Pro as a temporary solution and wait for the 2013 Haswell upgrades for the MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. However, if the new machines are released in June/July I wouldn't purchase until December/January as I like to wait until all issues are ironed out.
As you can see I am quite unsure about what I should do and would really appreciate any advice.
Thanks very much.