13" Productivity

Simple.

 

Word eats up a lot of real estate with the menus so I doubt you will enjoy having a doc and web page up at the same time. JMO ~~~~~. As an aside, how do you edit with Word and have a web page up on your 15". I do this myself but tile the aps over each other.

The 13" would be fine for editing a doc in Word. Plenty of speed and screen size.

cheers
JohnG

 

Having them open side by side so they're both visible at the same time may prove hard. Hell, its even hard on a 15" screen. But if you had both of them open, but NOT side by side, it will be fine. You just use 1 simple shortcut to switch between Word and the web browser.

 

Ah, will you be reading stuff on FireFox then typing it up at the same time?

 

Sorry, but ya might have a bit of trouble doing that on a 13" screen.

 

I did two years of grad school on an air and mbp (both 13 inch). Its fine since portability is more important for me. I had a 24 inch display that I used at home when I need the extra space for research purposes. but man that 15 inch is big to carry around! 13 is perfect. plus with expose, managing multiple documents is a cinch. You can also play around with the word document's size, and if you are using pdfs, you can adjust that as well to put two document side by side.

 

You could get an external 24" monitor for when ya wanted to run things side by side. And you can still take your compact 13" to classes/lectures. Then to study at night you can hook it up to the 24"

 

my friend has a 13" and i've seen him do multiple things on the screen with no clutter. thank you os x

 

I definitely find the 16:10 resolution and app-swapping tricks in OSX make it a very productive mobile solution. I played around with a 14'' 16:9 res PC notebook the other day and found it just didn't have enough vertical space.

For the price, the Macbook or Macbook Pro 13'' is really more than enough for most students just researching & reading reports. The 17'' MBP might be a LITTLE better as far as screen space, but you're also sacrificing some battery life, and a big chunk of your bank account. I would go for the MBP 13'' & a cheap $99-$150 monitor.

 

OS X's window management techniques and hot key combos allow you to multitask with multiple open apps easily no matter how small the display. The only hurdle is taking the time to learn all of them.

 

this. although i'd like to be able to put 2 documents fully side by side, expose and spaces makes up for this. With expose, I can quickly sort through 10-20 apps and find the windows I need. All it takes is one swipe of my fingers too

 

4 finger swipe down always amazes my friends.