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rhyzome

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Apr 2, 2012
394
84
Hi--
I've been using a 15.4 inch 2.4 Ghz MacBook Pro with 4 GB RAM since I purchased it in 2007, and have been gradually feeling the machine slow down as well as my back ache as I carry the machine around my university campus and look at everyone else with their light-looking Airs.

My MacBook Pro has faired well managing an Aperture library with 9,000 photos, an iTunes library with 10,000 tracks, and using Word and Safari with many documents and many, many research tabs open at once.

However, as of late, the machine has had a lot of trouble smoothly scrolling through big PDF books (1-200 MB, especially when the books are scanned as images, not text). I have increasingly experienced crashes in Safari when I have many tabs open in the browser, and this often leads to problems in my research as I depend on the tabs being 'remembered' to make progress. When more than a few of iTunes, Safari, Aperture and Word are open at once the machine is likely to give me the beach ball.

Thus, I am considering getting a new machine--and I would appreciate a lighter one. However, I would never make such a change at the expense of performance.

My question is, do the current (and for those who would like to predict, future) MacBook Airs measure up to the sort of use I have described? Could the current Airs keep lots of browser tabs, microsoft word documents, aperture libraries and iTunes libraries, and maybe a bunch of big fat PDF books and journal articles, open at once, without crashing or the user experiencing stalling/substantial slowdowns or other problems?

Thank you,
S
 
macbook air is great!

don't worry about the performance. the current version macbook air has i5/i7 processor, which can boost up to 2.9ghz in i7. plus it has great flash storage, which is 2 times faster than your hard drive. but due to the large collection of song,images and files, i recommend you to wait for the next-gen macbook air, which may have 512gb of flash storage.
 
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