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2nd MBP

R

Risasi

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 16, 2011
338
0
I'm trying to decide what to do for a 2nd MBP purchase. My wife's Dell is getting old and ready for retirement. I have a 2011 13" MBP, it's great...but I do wish it had a better GPU. Size is just about right, but sometimes I also wish I had a larger screen. I'm leaning toward two choices right now;

Option 1: Shop a 15" or 17" and buy it. Maybe find a deal on the Apple outlet. Then plan on keeping Applecare or Squaretrade on both, with the intent of getting 3-4 years of use out of them. Run 'em into the ground...

Option 2: Try to hold out until the next major MBP refresh and buy the next base 13" again. Forego Applecare and plan on buying a new 13" every major refresh, keeping the newest two and sell the oldest one every upgrade.

----

Both options seem like they have pros and cons. A 15"/17" would be nice to have around. If I need a little more real estate in the office that day, I just grab the bigger one. If I'm going to be more mobile, I grab the 13" in a sleeve and I'm out the door.
But two 13's gets me uniformity, easy to double up on sleeve's, bags, etc. Plus after a year I would expect the performance on even a base 13" will overshadow most of the 15's and 17's power from the previous major refresh. Not only that I can budget a pretty consistent $1200 annually, and get a kick-back on the third unit starting in two years.

I don't know. Decisions, decisions...
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_5 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8L1 Safari/6533.18.5)

LOL

She has no choice.

But it doesn't matter both machines will be set up with bootcamp for Windows 7. Actually she is now irritated she bought a Galaxy S instead of the iPhone 4 I tried to talk her into, so I don't anticipate OSX will bother her. Everything else in the house is now a Mac product.

Sent from remote...
 
Well, this is interesting. I stopped by Bestbuy and they had MBP's on sale. I picked up a 17" Pro for $2300.

- The screen is AWESOME! Side by side with the 13" it's not even fair. Brightness, clarity, etc. And I was comparing my 13" MBP to a coworker's 13" MBA on Friday. I would say those two 13's are on par with one another. Although my friend's MBA colors seemed a little less vivid. Hard to explain, but not enough to quibble. I could use either screen all day. But they all pale in comparison with this 17" screen.

- The weight isn't too bad, but the size is troublesome. It truly is best thought of as a desktop replacement. I have 14 days to return it, and I'm thinking I probably will. I'm leaning toward just picking up the base 13" MBA and call it good until next refresh. I really am beginning to think that the base 13" every major refresh is the best choice for me.
---

Honestly, I finally figured out what I want; 13" MBP, running 1440x900 res, 250GB of SSD storage, dedicated graphics card equivalent to the 6750m found in this 17". Oh, and throw in 10 hours of real battery life too.


P.S. My wife was fine with OSX...
 
Risasi said:
Honestly, I finally figured out what I want; 13" MBP, running 1440x900 res, 250GB of SSD storage, dedicated graphics card equivalent to the 6750m found in this 17". Oh, and throw in 10 hours of real battery life too.
Click to expand...

You and pretty much everyone else out there... :)

I'm holding out hope that the next generation of 13" Pro will forgo the optical drive in favour of a dedicated GPU and larger battery. And maybe a small SSD for the OS and applications (though that's not likely, imo).
 
Demosthenes X said:
You and pretty much everyone else out there... :)

I'm holding out hope that the next generation of 13" Pro will forgo the optical drive in favour of a dedicated GPU and larger battery. And maybe a small SSD for the OS and applications (though that's not likely, imo).
Click to expand...

"You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.." ;)
 
What the hey, man!

I took back the 17" MBP and got my money back, then bought the 13" MBA. just the base model. It seems faster than the top of the line MBP, and I think I just lost it to my wife. I believe this experience made me a firm believer in SSD.

So experiment complete. Most likely I will be buying a 13" base model MBA (or MBP if available in the future) every major refresh. Possibly every other refresh. Sell the oldest one.
 
Yeah a 15-17" MBP with SSD will eat an MBA alive, but without an SSD the Air will definitely seem quicker for everyday tasks
 
Risasi said:
What the hey, man!

I took back the 17" MBP and got my money back, then bought the 13" MBA. just the base model. It seems faster than the top of the line MBP, and I think I just lost it to my wife. I believe this experience made me a firm believer in SSD.

So experiment complete. Most likely I will be buying a 13" base model MBA (or MBP if available in the future) every major refresh. Possibly every other refresh. Sell the oldest one.
Click to expand...

SSD's will feel faster for everyday stuff. The reason (some of) us go with the larger MBP's is because we need the face-melting power of the Core i7's, and/or the bigger screen.
 
I'd almost swear, ever since I went a-lusting after that 17" my 13" MBP has been beach-balling me like 3 times a day now...

As to the SSD, yes I knew it would make the MBA seem faster in everyday tasks. I was just surprised by how much snappier it seemed compared to the 17" MBP. It wasn't even fair. Like Alexander at Gaugamela...out-work the more powerful army. Do more with less.

Well, it's nice to know I can just drop in a drive and an 8GB memory upgrade in my 13" MBP and have the best of both worlds. Faster CPU with a fireball SSD drive. That should get me by until the next MBP refresh.
 
buy what she needs, not what she dont needs. u can pay for a fully loaded macbook pro, but whats hte point if ur not gonna take advantage of the high specs
 
I was made an offer I could not refuse. I just picked up a deal on a 2.2Ghz 17" MBP for $1700 out the door. This is the early 2011 model. I dropped in my 120GB SSD drive from OWC and so far everything seems functional.

I also already have a buyer for my 13" MBP. So I'm upgrading. A client is buying it. I'm going to put Applecare on it and then sell it to him for $1050.

* The 17" is still too big, but I'm willing to put up with it most days. We will be keeping the 13" MBA, so in the event I need to take something lighter for the day, I'll have the Air set up to handle business too. I also have the iPad for really light days.

* I figure if it becomes "too much laptop" I can always turn around and sell it and break even, then get the Ivy Bridge MBA.

* I'm back to the 17" because I "need" more screen. This past week I've been connecting to a lot of servers, and client workstations. Resized dual-screen 1680x1050 monitors is not fun to work on for hours at a time. Likewise server sessions have been driving me batty.

I plan to upgrade the memory and the drive to a hybrid maybe this fall. I figure that way it should last me 2-4 years.

---

ADDENDUM: ...and it's back to the store. I found a bad "u" key cap. Easily fixable, but using it this weekend I still found the 17" too unwieldy and it didn't solve my problem during extended use. I think it's related to looking downward at the wrong angle for long periods of time. I think I'm stilling selling my current 13" MBP and using my iPhone for now, augmented with a couple desktop computers strategically placed. I'm going to wait for the next MBA and MBP refresh, then we shall see. Now I'm back to thinking 11" MBA with regular monitors in the places where I use my computer for extended periods of time. And maybe a Mac mini here and there.
 
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