I need help deciding on these combos..

[Diversion]

I get the education discount from Best Buy which is a flat $150 off any Macbooks.. Below are the adjusted prices after discount:

Macbook Air 13 2014 i5/4gb/128ssd $799
Macbook Pro 13 i5/4gb/128ssd $1084
Macbook Pro 13 i5/8gb/256ssd $1274

And for fun they are also doing $150 off all Lenovo Yoga notebooks:

Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro i7/8gb/256ssd $1049
Lenovo Yoga 2 i5/4gb/500gb $629


The Yoga2Pro is probably the best deal for raw power for the money.. but it's still no Mac in terms of quality/battery life. The 1800p screens on those are kinda meh.. especially at low brightness they like to flicker, etc. And battery life.. I had one briefly and I tested it around 5 hours for light to medium usage.

The 2014 Base model Air 13" sounds like a really great deal at $799.. But i'm afraid 4gb might be too little.. I need to run Bootcamp via Parallels 90% of the time for work and I already know i'm going to hate the TN panel on the Air because i've had the 12 and 13 models and it's just meh but the rest of the machine is every bit of a Pro machine in terms of quality and fit and finish.

Right now my eyes are set on the MBPR 13 with i5/8gb/256gb for the extra ram and storage for a more flexible boot camp partition.

The other last choice would be a MBA 13 with i5/4gb/256 for $989

Grr what to do..

 

[ShiggyMiyamoto]

I get the education discount from Best Buy which is a flat $150 off any Macbooks.. Below are the adjusted prices after discount:

Macbook Air 13 2014 i5/4gb/128ssd $799
Macbook Pro 13 i5/4gb/128ssd $1084
Macbook Pro 13 i5/8gb/256ssd $1274

And for fun they are also doing $150 off all Lenovo Yoga notebooks:

Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro i7/8gb/256ssd $1049
Lenovo Yoga 2 i5/4gb/500gb $629


The Yoga2Pro is probably the best deal for raw power for the money.. but it's still no Mac in terms of quality/battery life. The 1800p screens on those are kinda meh.. especially at low brightness they like to flicker, etc. And battery life.. I had one briefly and I tested it around 5 hours for light to medium usage.

The 2014 Base model Air 13" sounds like a really great deal at $799.. But i'm afraid 4gb might be too little.. I need to run Bootcamp via Parallels 90% of the time for work and I already know i'm going to hate the TN panel on the Air because i've had the 12 and 13 models and it's just meh but the rest of the machine is every bit of a Pro machine in terms of quality and fit and finish.

Right now my eyes are set on the MBPR 13 with i5/8gb/256gb for the extra ram and storage for a more flexible boot camp partition.

The other last choice would be a MBA 13 with i5/4gb/256 for $989

Grr what to do..

What I bold faced doesn't make sense... lol You either run Parallels atop OS X with Windows or something else installed, or you run BootCamp which requires an entire reboot to work...

Anyway, I'd say yeah go for the rMBP 13" model you mentioned there. For what you wanna do (school stuff I'm assuming) that'd be more than enough for years to come.

 

[Diversion]

What I bold faced doesn't make sense... lol You either run Parallels atop OS X with Windows or something else installed, or you run BootCamp which requires an entire reboot to work...

Anyway, I'd say yeah go for the rMBP 13" model you mentioned there. For what you wanna do (school stuff I'm assuming) that'd be more than enough for years to come.

You can Bootcamp Win7 or Win8 and then use Parallels to VM it inside OSX. I wasn't sure how to word it better but I hope this makes sense.. So basically i'm going to run my Win8 inside OSX almost all the time.

 

[ShiggyMiyamoto]

You can Bootcamp Win7 or Win8 and then use Parallels to VM it inside OSX. I wasn't sure how to word it better but I hope this makes sense.. So basically i'm going to run my Win8 inside OSX almost all the time.

Okay phrased like that that makes sense... I just didn't wanna see people confused lol

 

[Trvlngnrs]

I'd get the MBP with the 256 SSD. You don't want to run out of storage space and have to carry around an external hard drive at school

 

[Altemose]

You can Bootcamp Win7 or Win8 and then use Parallels to VM it inside OSX. I wasn't sure how to word it better but I hope this makes sense.. So basically i'm going to run my Win8 inside OSX almost all the time.

Don't forget about refurbs. With the latest copy of Parallels, you can form a Boot Camp partition and use Parallels to access it atop of OS X. Then when you need full performance, you can boot right into the Boot Camp partition for Windows.

 

[maflynn]

I wasn't sure how to word it better but I hope this makes sense.. So basically i'm going to run my Win8 inside OSX almost all the time.

Depending on what you're running, you may want to consider bootcamp which runs windows natively and not within Windows. This gives you the best performance for windows.

If you are going to run windows in a virtualized environment, then I'd recommend 8GB of ram, because you need to give both operating systems sufficient resources and 4GB is a bit tight for running windows within Parallels or Vmware Fusion.

 

[Diversion]

Don't forget about refurbs. With the latest copy of Parallels, you can form a Boot Camp partition and use Parallels to access it atop of OS X. Then when you need full performance, you can boot right into the Boot Camp partition for Windows.

I looked into Refurb'd but Apple won't apply the student discount on top of the refurb price because "It's already discounted" per the rep.

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Thanks all, I think i'll pick up the MBP 13 i5/8gb/256 !

 

[Altemose]

I looked into Refurb'd but Apple won't apply the student discount on top of the refurb price because "It's already discounted" per the rep.

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Thanks all, I think i'll pick up the MBP 13 i5/8gb/256 !

The only reason I said it was because the refurbs are sometimes cheaper than the student discounts. That one is a great machine. Let us know if you have any questions.