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MacBook Air Haswell worth £150 more?

Z

zachmo360

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 20, 2013
20
0
Hi,
I'm looking to buy a MacBook Air 13" in the next few months and have £900, but I'm aware of the upcoming haswell refresh. At the moment I can get a 13" MBA 128gb ssd 4gb ram for £830. After the haswell refresh I'm sure the price will go back to £999 so I'm asking; is the haswell upgrade worth £150?
Also, will 4gb ram be enough or do I need 8gb? (Bearing in mind this will effectively cost £200 as the £830 deal is a one-off), my uses are: General Internet (Facebook etc), word processing, photo editing in iPhoto (only light so no raw files or anything), light video editing in iMovie, Netflix, iTunes, and maybe running some parallels for windows or Linux.
I would pay the £80 upgrade for the ram usually, but I have doubts this time as it raises the price by £220!
Any comments would be appreciated!
 
I think you are drawing the long bow of speculation there old boy.
no one really knows Apple's pricing structure until it is announced.
generally they keep pricing the same or even decrease it on successive releases.
that hasn't always been the case but it does seem to have been the trend over the last couple of years.
another factor could be the strength of local currency to the USD - but again that doen't seem to be much of a factor in Cupertino's thinking either and I use as an example the strength of the Aussie $ over the past few years has not translated into lower pricing here when compared with the US Apple Store.

overall, I'd wait and see what price the new release comes in at and if it's too dear for you then buy a just superseded refurb from Apple Store UK

http://www.refurb.me/uk/

Haswell will be worth it from what I've been reading - yet how much so for your usage is up to you.
it always come down to the combination of CPU, amount and speed of RAM plus speed of HDD rather than just the CPU 'speed'
 
Thanks for reply, I didn't mean apple would up the price, it's just I found a sweet deal on a brand new MBA, I think I'll wait anyway and see what the refresh has to offer. Thanks for that refurb site, apple store is a bit bare at the moment :(

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Also, do you think 4gb ram would be enough to run parallels on, does anyone do it on their MBA???
 
I know a guy who runs windows 7 via vm with 8gb ram (mbp) and allocates 2gb to win7, anyone get away with 1.5???
 
ill try 1.5gb on my windows 7 vm now, what programmes you going to be using?
 
Wow that's pretty decent discount, is the discount for anyone or do you have to purchase through a school??
 
Are you a student at all? Or do you know anyone who is? If so you can get the 128gb 13" for ~£860 so the new haswell equipped ones would probably be the same price after the student discount. That'd probably lessen the need to worry about whether it's worth £30 more.

Otherwise I would still probably suggest waiting, though how many years do you intend on keeping this as your main computer for? If it's more than 2-3 maybe it'd be worth waiting because the new Haswell chips are supposedly quite a nice upgrade (in terms of battery usage and graphics performance).

As for the ram 4gb many people will say is good enough for that now, but again if you are having it for a couple years I'd say go for 8 because it's not upgradeable. If you want to run VMs I'd say go 8gb though.
 
I'd use 1.5 for basic use, how much would you use for stuff like Vegas pro??

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I'll definitely wait for haswell then, but then I would have 2 options:
11" 128SSD 8gb ram
13" 128SSD 4gb ram
 
zachmo360 said:
Wow that's pretty decent discount, is the discount for anyone or do you have to purchase through a school??
Click to expand...

ive sent that link to 1 or 2 people to use at home, each has received exactly what they ordered.
worst case is you get refunded and dot get the laptop, but that wont happen.

just tried 1.5gb, its not great. i have 8gb allocated to windows 7

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zachmo360 said:
I'll definitely wait for haswell then, but then I would have 2 options:
11" 128SSD 8gb ram
13" 128SSD 4gb ram
Click to expand...

why not 13" with 8gb? £930 with my link
 
yep, the same dilema my flatmate had, he's gone for the retina. better screen, extra tb port and hdmi port, and 2.5 processor
if you can put your hands on the money, go retina.
 
What are all your setups, after I get a new MBA mine should be, MBA 13", 21.7" external display, ipad mini, iPhone 5.
 
I have 8gb on my 2012 and it slows down a bit with photos. In this day and age I wouldn't recommend less than 8gb on any computer.
 
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