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nms886

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 24, 2012
5
0
I'm looking to get my first macbook in a week or two and am on the fence between the 11 inch and 13 inch MBA's. I have been using my girlfriends 2010 MBP and am very much used to the positioning of of the keyboard and trackpad. I had read online and seen in pictures that the 11 inch is more cramped then the 13" so i was worried i will not like the keyboard. Sucks I havent had time to see an air in person since the closest mac store is 2 hours away.

I wanted the i7 and 8gb ram because I will probably push the air to its limits. I will be doing some autocad for use with my departments cnc machine as well as lots of programing with java, c, c++, etc. I like to play around with photoshop but nothing too serious and really just want to play diablo, minecraft, cod, and left 4 dead. The reason I say i5 13 inch air is because if im alread at 1630$ with the i7 i mise well go for the rMBP.

I would love to have my own MBP but being as the new rMBP seems to be the only good option right now and I dont know if I feel comfortable shelling out the 2100$ for it (even though i think it would be worth it) since ill be spending all my summer savings.

So maybe someone can help me decide which MB i should buy.


Thank you very much, Ricky
 
Seems to me that if you have to choose between the two, the RAM upgrade is the better option. The RAM will more likely bottleneck the performance of the MBA before the processor. The i7's performance is not THAT much better than the i5, but 8GB and 4GB of RAM differ by a factor of two. But then again, this is my opinion. You seem to plan on running some processor intensive programs...
 
I went with the 11.6" i7/8GB just because I read and thought:
  • The GPU may get more shared RAM when running 8GB
  • I may want to virtualize Windows 8 and the RAM will help
  • Since the RAM is not upgradeable, why not?
 
I went 13/i5/8gb

Ram would be a factor before processor for me and would prefer a larger screen
 
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