Anyone switch from iMac to MacBook Air or Pro Retina?

[icemantx]

I have an early 2009 24" 2.93 GHz iMac and I am debating on if I should go portable or replace with a new iMac. I have upgraded mine to have a 2TB Fusion drive and 8GB RAM, but even those upgrades leave me less than satisfied with photo editing in iPhoto (40k photos). I have Aperture also, but find iPhoto easier to use..

I use iPhoto for casual photography of vacations, family and random stuff with my Sony A57 DSLR and Sony RX100. The file sizes of these two camera makes iPhoto sluggish at times, however it is still usable.

I am not too into video editing as I generally just upload clips to YouTube and share.

The biggest difference in now vs 2009 is then I used it a lot for what I now use my iPhone 5 and iPad mini for - content consumption. I no longer listen to music on it, watch movies or surf the web very often. We do however stream movies often from the iMac to the AppleTV.

So my question is have any of you switched from an iMac to either the MacBook Air (11" or 13") or MacBook Pro Retina 13"? If so, which did you switch to and do you miss your iMac?

I am leaning Air I think and buying a monitor to connect to for times when I want to have a larger screen.

Thoughts?

Jeff

 

[Bear]

....
I am leaning Air I think and buying a monitor to connect to for times when I want to have a larger screen.

And an external disk drive for your overflow photos? And depending on how large your iPhoto library is, the 8GB of ram may not be quite enough.

Also, do you need the portability of a laptop? If not, I'd suggest sticking with an iMac.

 

[Commy1]

I recommend using some sort of cloud storage and an external drive.
The MBA would be a fantastic upgrade as long as you can handle the screen downsize. A maxed out MBA can have up to 512gb (I think) but 40,000 pics at high quality would take up more than half of that easily.

I would purchase a 2TB wireless external drive, such as the Time Capsule or other for Time Machine back ups and storage and invest 100$ (or more) a year into a bigger Dropbox. That way you could still get away with a cheaper laptop (i5-i7, 8GB Ram, 256GB SSD)

Or another option is, like what I've done with my Macbook, pick up a MBPro non-Retina with upgraded CPU and GPU, swap out the Ram to 16GB, an SSD and purchase an optical drive Caddy off ebay for the standard HDD that came with it for storage.
My MB 08 still runs smooth as silk with the SSD for installed content only, while everything else is stored on the HDD. Remember to get the TRIM patch for third party SSD's.

 

[yliu]

Switched from a 2008 iMac (2.4 Ghz, 4GB RAM, 250 hard drive, ATI 2600) to a 15 inch rMBP with 2.6GHz and 8 GB ram.

I used the iMac for general tasks like surfing web, IM, pages, number, keynote, casual gaming and occasionally Aperture. It was adequate for my uses and I still use it. Looking at benchmarks, the MBA base model would blow it out of the water.

According to Geekbench, the base model MBA is faster than your iMac (3.06 GHz C2D). I'm not sure about what GPU your iMac has though. So there should be a speed bump no matter which model you choose.

The 13' rMBP is not worth it unless you really want the retina display in a 13 inch laptop. The HD4000 is too weak for the display. You should wait for the update.
However, you are not gonna get 2TB of storage unless you go with a normal MBP and replace the optical drive with another hard drive.