I concur with the previous posters that would like to never encounter you as a medical professional. These forums are full of morons like this who bellow ignorant misinformation like this all day long. That's part of the problem with forums, 5% are helpful, 95% are self proclaimed experts.
This guy has no idea which one will last longer, it's completely random due to variances in manufacturing. He or she might state that the Macbook Pro will last longer from a technological side of things, however if one will just think about that statement for a moment one will realize that it is a fallacy.
As someone who has worked in a research lab for over three years and heading to a MD/PhD program, this is what I know. Your computer doesn't need to run Photoshop, every lab already has the latest version installed on it, free of charge to you. There is a reason medical school is so expensive. You do not need to go anymore into debt than necessary. The same goes to a number of other graphic intensive research applications. I know of three separate cases of doctors in their forties who are still over one hundred thousand dollars in debt, one of which is having their house foreclosed on. Before the credit crunch banks were very willing to lend doctors large amounts of debt. With the huge problems banks are having now, it will be a long time until this leniency is restored. So when in school, do not live in a house all by yourself spending more than you have to, thinking you can pay it off later very easily. You'll make more friends living with others.
Most posters on here are so obsessed with power. Threads are started here everyday asking if their computer or future computer is powerful enough to handle windows or some program that could be run by any computer from three years ago. The answer is almost always yes. Macrumors celebrates that they have so many threads and postings. I believe that this is a celebration of idiocy. If my iBook can run Photoshop, then your Macbook Pro, Macbook, iMac, Macmini, Windows machine ect. can run it too. So many posts are dedicated to asking if a computer is powerful enough to handle what a user does. Users ask if they need to upgrade their Macbook Pro mid 2007 to a Macbook Pro early 2008. The answer is no, one does not need to upgrade their computer, one needs to upgrade their brain. You know what most people do, they surf the internet for the majority of their time on their computer. Sure they will occasionally do some word processing and send some email, however most people have their computer for their entertainment, not their job. This will probably elicit five or ten responses that they do their job on that computer, however I hope that those who do are self employed. I would not wish to have an employer who did not provide me with tools to perform my job.
The bottom line is that before posting you already knew that as your second computer, the lowest specification Macbook would be just fine. If you want to have the Macbook Air or Macbook Pro as a status symbol that is your choice, it is the same reason that most people buy those products.
