Not everybody uses their computer for the same thing. Just because you only use x does not mean everyone only needs x.
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2011 MBA 13" vs 2011 MBP 13"
- Thread starter jmgregory1
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Not everybody uses their computer for the same thing. Just because you only use x does not mean everyone only needs x.
The other thing that I'm pondering is that with SSD, paging memory becomes a lot less painful.
In comparison to a mechanical drive, yes, but the fastest consumer SSD is still about 20 times slower than DDR3 1366 MHz RAM
Yeah, I thought it might be that way for me, but it wasn't. I generally have 3-5 desktops full of stuff. Usually 2-3 IM clients, Chrome and Safari open. Usually a couple connections to various servers or client computers, either locally or via VPN's into remote offices.
What I noticed is a lot of app switching or even opening some new thing I was starting to get perhaps a dozen beachballs a day and just general slowness switching between applications. I'm still running on 4GB, so one would think it's memory but I have zero pageouts. So memory is not my problem. If I need to start running VM's locally again I will need to upgrade to 8GB.
Anyway I used carbon copy clone and pasted my HDD image to an OWC SSD drive. It's been fine since then. So I actually see improvement in day-to-day tasks too, not just on boot up speeds. I also find it a lot less painful to reboot into Windows 7 for my Total War (game) fix when I'm home at night.
I think I would probably get an ssd if I had Windows on my Mac. It seems to me that you could really see the benefits in switching back and forth.
I suspect that each user's individual combination of apps has a major impact on performance. One person doing X might have a totally different experience than one doing Y. Unfortunately, I think my usage needs a lot of RAM. More than that, I might need to stick with Snow Leopard (because of Adobe Pro), so no Air or new computer at all for a while. Sad stuff
I tried a new experiment. I popped my HDD back in at the beginning of this week and ran it through Wednesday. Since I only have about 65GB of stuff on my OSX partition, I carbon copy cloned my SSD data, then shrunk the HDD partition down to 60GB (after removing COD4).
Aside from boot up time of about 35 seconds, I didn't see any real slowdown in day to day tasks when compared to my SSD. So in my case the MBP wins, even without an SSD. The only concession being SSD speed, resolution and weight.
Aside from boot up time of about 35 seconds, I didn't see any real slowdown in day to day tasks when compared to my SSD. So in my case the MBP wins, even without an SSD. The only concession being SSD speed, resolution and weight.