Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Help please ~~ MacBook Pro or Air? ~~

I went through this same dilema

I went through the Same dilema this summer. I have a MPB17 which was killing me on the road for work. I love it but it is a big computer and I have to carry a POS work laptop for email. I was looking at the MBP13 and the MBA 13. After the update in August I purchased a MacBook Air 13 i5 with 256 SSD. I came to this decision painfully but am sure that I made the correct choice. I love this laptop. I rarely need a DVD drive so that leaned me to the air. I love the weight and the fact that even the charging block is small. The display is great and I have not had an issue with crocessing anything. I use Aperture 3 to process RAW photos and the Air handles this with ease. The Battery life is 5 hours in real world. It will make a plane trip across the country. I found that connecting my iPhone or iPod to it to charge drops the battery very fast but it has never been an issue. This laptop is one of the few purchases I have made in my life that has far exceeded my expectations. Good luck with your decision. Also for purchasing no matter what your choice, check out the apple referb store on the bottom left if the Apple Store front page. It changes daily but there are amazing deals and all referb items come fully warrentied and checked stem to stern better than most new products, great way to same 15-20%

:apple: MacBook Pro 17
:apple: MacBook Air 13
:apple: iPhone 4S 64G
:apple: iPod Classic 160 GB
:apple: Time Capsule 2TB
Canon 7D
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

Here's a question I have regarding no drive.

How would I install MS Office? All I need is Word and PowerPoint but I use both for papers and presentations. Can you download them on the App Store or is there a digital download I can purchase?
 
Sith Vol said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

Here's a question I have regarding no drive.

How would I install MS Office? All I need is Word and PowerPoint but I use both for papers and presentations. Can you download them on the App Store or is there a digital download I can purchase?
Click to expand...

I installed office on my MBA using the DVD Drive in my MBP via remote drive. An other option is to use a USB DVD Drive or create a disk image on a flash media of some kind.

MacBook Pro 17
MacBook Air 13
iPhone 4S 64G
iPod Classic 160 GB
Time Capsule 2TB
Canon 7D
 
PoizonIvy said:
I pulled the trigger on the Air tonight and am expecting it to be here by Thursday! Spoke with an Amazon rep via chat and was told if I am unhappy I have 30 days to return it for a FULL refund. I also ordered the Rearth Verco keyboard protector while I was at it. Spoke with someone from there too and was told they now support the new 2011 Air so I thought wth not. lol

Now if I can just convince myself not to second guess my decision in the next day and a half, while I am waiting, I will be all set. lol
Click to expand...

you've made the correct decision :) though personally I would've purchased direct from Apple Store - either in-store or online.

seriously, unless you are a professional - the Air is more than enough.
anyways, if you end up second guessing your decision - that you really wanted the MBPro - keep the Air for a few months until the new look MBPros arrive and upgrade then.
you'll take a small hit in $ but it'll be worth it.
in the meantime you'll be more than happy with your Air.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

WarpSpawn said:
It looks like they do sell it for download as well.

http://www.microsoft.com/mac

Though direct from Microsoft may not always be the cheapest option.
Click to expand...

Good deal. I saw that. I'd just need the Student edition. I guess it's better than spending the money on the portable DVD drive that I'd rarely ever use.
 
halledise said:
you've made the correct decision :) though personally I would've purchased direct from Apple Store - either in-store or online.

seriously, unless you are a professional - the Air is more than enough.
anyways, if you end up second guessing your decision - that you really wanted the MBPro - keep the Air for a few months until the new look MBPros arrive and upgrade then.
you'll take a small hit in $ but it'll be worth it.
in the meantime you'll be more than happy with your Air.
Click to expand...

I am a professional and the AIR is still enough.
 
halledise said:
you've made the correct decision :) though personally I would've purchased direct from Apple Store - either in-store or online.

seriously, unless you are a professional - the Air is more than enough.
anyways, if you end up second guessing your decision - that you really wanted the MBPro - keep the Air for a few months until the new look MBPros arrive and upgrade then.
you'll take a small hit in $ but it'll be worth it.
in the meantime you'll be more than happy with your Air.
Click to expand...


My Air arrived at 5pm-ish today and I have been buried deep in it since then. It's a whole new world for me since I have always been a Windows user. There were times today I could have pulled my hair out in frustration, but I made it through. It's going to be a learning curve for me but so far I am enjoying it immensely. Particularly the long battery life. My Air lasted for 6 hours out of the box with no charging! :D
 
...

To anyone saying theybget 10 hours from an air you are either full of crap and your clock is broken or you mean 10 hours with wifi off, brightness all the way down and typing a document. Turn on wifi, let the brightness auto adjust and start surfing the web (even without flash) and you arent getting 10 hours. I have owned many mac laptops including a 2010 and 2011 air. Neither of them approached the battery life of the ipad which gts 10 hours nomatter what you are doing. Turn on a simple game on the air like lux (a basic risk style board gam) and the battery life drops to 2.5 hours. I could play any game i want on the ipad of and do it for 10 hours
 
OK, I can kind of see where people are coming from with the quality of the screen being slightly lower on the Air. I had a play with the two side by side in a local Bestbuy today and, although they only had SL on them not Lion, there was a slight but noticeable difference to my eye. I felt that the colours did look ever so slightly less vibrant on the Air, when viewing the same content preloaded on the demo machines. It also seemed to me that the viewing angles on the Air were worse, so that even a small movement on my head (vertically in particular) resulted in some distortion of the colours, dark ones especially.

On the flip side, I did appreciate the significantly sharper display on the Air. I do not think it would bother me all that much if I only had the Pro to look at but side by side it almost looked a tiny bit blurry in comparison. It certainly shows that you can get more on the same screen size with the Air as well, although some may prefer things to be a little bigger at the expense of sharpness and efficient use of screen real estate.

I don't think the shortcomings I believed I saw would be a deal breaker for me if I had my heart set on it but I definitely feel there are some trade offs involved whichever model one goes for.

And no, I have no idea which panel the Air had. Nor did I take the time to adjust it so it is possible this would alleviate it to some extent, if not completely. Indeed, being a display model, I cannot be sure that it had not been messed with to make it look worse than out of the box.

ETA: Just to be clear, both were 13" versions.
 
newdeal said:
To anyone saying theybget 10 hours from an air you are either full of crap and your clock is broken or you mean 10 hours with wifi off, brightness all the way down and typing a document. Turn on wifi, let the brightness auto adjust and start surfing the web (even without flash) and you arent getting 10 hours. I have owned many mac laptops including a 2010 and 2011 air. Neither of them approached the battery life of the ipad which gts 10 hours nomatter what you are doing. Turn on a simple game on the air like lux (a basic risk style board gam) and the battery life drops to 2.5 hours. I could play any game i want on the ipad of and do it for 10 hours
Click to expand...


Sorry not full of crap. I sat in a Seminar from 8:30am till 4pm typing notes the whole time other than lunch when I had to shut it down. It still said it had 6 hours left of battery life! I used most of that up the next day at work installing Win 7 and Virtual Fusion on battery. Still had an hour left after that was done. Games, browsing the web, are all more cpu intensive and of course it will kill the battery. But this laptop has the ability to go over 10 hours on what I did with it with ease.

I had WIFI turned off and Bluetooth. Also turned the brightness down to about 3-4 bars.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back