Yeah I was thinking 8 gb since thats the minimum on a rMBP, think I will go with that
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MBA or rMBP?
- Thread starter dominiongamma
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Yeah I was thinking 8 gb since thats the minimum on a rMBP, think I will go with that
I'm currently attending college and would like to get a MBA or rMBP, I can afford the 13 inch one on both, and I would like a laptop to last for couple years 3-4, which one you recommend because I'm torn with the light wight of the MBA and the nice screen of the rMBP. Any help would be greatly apprecate
Even aside from the screen they're very different systems now. I have a mid-2012 MacBook Air that I'm happy with, but Apple doesn't sell a MacBook Air like this anymore. To build something comparable today you'd need to get a MacBook Pro.
While the more RAM the better, I'm quite satisfied with 8GB for what I do.
My point was that it was said that the 13" rmbp has a far stronger i5 and i7 CPU due to higher standard clocks and almost double the TDP, but in reality it's about 5-10% faster than a comparable i5 and i7 used in the Air (despite having very low standard clocks) because the a lot of the extra TDP and power are designated to Iris rather than CPU. Also another of my point is that when considering rmbp or mba, RAM, weight, and display should be the factors one has to consider rather than CPU speed. IMO, i7 is overpriced for Air, 13" rMBP considering that you pay minimum $200 extra to get 200 more points on geekbench
Way to rip off consumers Intel!My point was that it was said that the 13" rmbp has a far stronger i5 and i7 CPU due to higher standard clocks and almost double the TDP, but in reality it's about 5-10% faster than a comparable i5 and i7 used in the Air (despite having very low standard clocks) because the a lot of the extra TDP and power are designated to Iris rather than CPU. Also another of my point is that when considering rmbp or mba, RAM, weight, and display should be the factors one has to consider rather than CPU speed. IMO, i7 is overpriced for Air, 13" rMBP considering that you pay minimum $200 extra to get 200 more points on geekbench
Those clock speeds are misleading and almost pointless. Modern Intel CPUs constantly change their clock speeds between 800MHz, their maximum turbo boost speed, and it seems like almost anything in between.
I believe the clock speed rating might be the highest "guaranteed" sustained clock speed if you design a laptop with Intel's recommended TDP.
Since the MBA has a bunch of thermal overhead, the clock speeds of its chips seem to be completely irrelevant.
The base model MacBook Air is more powerful than most give it credit. As a photographer I regularly edit 1GB .tiff files in Photoshop with my Air connected to a 27" screen. Unless you're doing a bunch of hi-definition video editing or running some heavy virtualization software I think you will be hard pressed to run a MacBook Air to the point of really losing performance. The portability and battery life really are as impressive as advertised.
I normally would agree with everything but after seeing the screen with retina it's hard to go back to the screen of an Air
Hi, I'm really torn between which one I need. I've never actually owned a Mac laptop so I'm used to crappy windows. But now that I have an iPhone, I'm really wanting to invest in the Apple ecosystem. Currently, I have the HP Split Windows laptop and while it's ok, I've already suffered through a crashed hard drive and sometimes when using my Plex server, the video will stutter. Also, sometimes it goes into a deep sleep mode that I just can't seem to prevent even within the options.
These are the main things I would want to use my laptop for:
- Running my Plex Server with movies stored on my external hard drive - another question I have here, can I just plug in my external hard drive that I've been using on PC into a Mac, or do I need to completely wipe it and reformat?
- Internet Browsing
- iTunes Match - mostly needing to import cd's
- and not much else. My daughter is only 5 but will probably need to do homework on it at some point. I'm not really a gamer and if I do it's on my Xbox One or mobile device. I may check out Sim City or something but nothing like GTA.
Thoughts?
These are the main things I would want to use my laptop for:
- Running my Plex Server with movies stored on my external hard drive - another question I have here, can I just plug in my external hard drive that I've been using on PC into a Mac, or do I need to completely wipe it and reformat?
- Internet Browsing
- iTunes Match - mostly needing to import cd's
- and not much else. My daughter is only 5 but will probably need to do homework on it at some point. I'm not really a gamer and if I do it's on my Xbox One or mobile device. I may check out Sim City or something but nothing like GTA.
Thoughts?
I don't know what a Plex Server is, but WRT drives: you can plug in an external drive and read the files from it just fine. If it's an NTFS drive (which it probably is) then you will not be able to WRITE files to the drive without 3rd party software.
Since external drives are so cheap these days, I imagine it wouldn't be a big deal to get another, format it for the Mac, and copy your stuff over to the new drive so you can read and write it. And then you will have an extra drive around that you can use for backups.
My posts on here so far have been (not very subtle) sarcasm, as pointed out by some of the more clever posters. But since half of the advice is so horribly misinformed and downright bizare (recently someone did indeed recommend 48gb RAM for word editing /nosarcasm), I think I have to start marking sarcasm with a sarcasm-tag as suggested. This of course defeats the purpose of sarcasm and is actually quite worrying.Yeah I was thinking 8 gb since thats the minimum on a rMBP, think I will go with that
You created this thread without any information on your usage and then poster started to give random advice.
After you posted your usage still posters continued to suggest: "Max out everything."
Let's be abundantly clear:
Are you aware that your needs can be met by any smartphone or tablet?
My original iPad from 2010 with 256mbRAM, 16gb snail-storage, a single core processor and some gpu I am not aware of, can stream 1080p movies via an hdmi adapter and run pages, numbers, keynote and netflix.
For what you are doing any upgrade is a money-donation to
.The only things you should be considering is:
battery life, screen quality/estate, size and weight, connectivity and maybe the size and type of storage.
Anyone suggesting any other geeky upgrades simply doesn't know what they are talking about, is being sarcastic or a troll.
Even though not necessary for you specifically, I recommend this link:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1756865/
Thanks! Basically what the Plex server does is broadcasts movie files from my hard drive across my Wifi network so I can play the files both on my mobile device and Xbox One. So my only worry would be if the MacBook Air doesn't have a fast enough processor or if that would even come into play. Obviously the MBP wins the spec war there but I don't know if I actually need that fast of processor to run the Plex server. I'm guessing my HP laptop lags currently just because Windows in general sucks right now. I have more crashes on this PC than I can keep track of. LOL
If you don't understand synthetic benchmarks, or how to read them, then you really shouldn't quote them to offer purchasing advice to people. I consider that to be quite irresponsible.
It should take absolutely minimal processing power to just send files over a network.
If the Plex Server is transcoding video files though, i.e., decoding the video and then re-encoding it to best suit whatever target device you're trying to play it on, then that would take an enormous amount of processing power. But it's hard for me to imagine that that's what they're doing, since it would run poorly on most peoples' computers.
I agree that Windows sucks. If it's running poorly, it's hard to say what's causing the problems. I know their automatic update software will bring computers to a grinding halt at unpredictable times and for no obvious reason.
Saying that windows sucks is an understatement.
I recently tried to run windows 8 on a mba and wasted two afternoons with no outcome.
At work I deal with computers running windows all the time and it makes life miserable and everyone is constantly complaining and angry about this ridicolous OS. (Win7) Almost everyone who changes from Win to Mac has an eyeopening experience. Microsoft just does not understand how computers are supposed to work.
Yeah. I wish I had more details on the Plex Server. It runs well most of the time on my HP Split but sometimes it will buffer and I'm guessing it's probably because no matter what I try, the laptop runs horribly. It sucks because it was a $700 device and never had very good performance. I missed my return window because I thought windows 8.1 would fix it but I was wrong. If iOS compared to Windows is an eye opening experience then it sounds like the MBA is probably the way to go.
It's possible to use that much when writing the largest Mersenne Prime on a word document /no sarcasm
Oh I recall working with some 'less IT literate' marketing people, that filled up word documents and powerpoints with high res pictures, those could bring your machine seriously to its knees.
No, not kidding.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1833665/
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You can bring down any system with any app if you put your mind to it.
In case this was misunderstood, I am not advocating for huge amounts of RAM (I also believe that 4 GB is more than enough for most people) but as Einstein said it so nicely, the stupidity of people is infinite...
at 13" I would be inclined to go with the Air. It's cheaper and battery life is a lot better.
If you were willing to buy a 15" (check apple refurb store) then I would obviously get the pro.
If you were willing to buy a 15" (check apple refurb store) then I would obviously get the pro.
Funny enough I would say the opposite:
For a 13" I would go with the Pro, it is slightly heavier and a tiny bit thicker (but at the thick end they are pretty much the same), but has a slightly smaller footprint and not too much extra weight. The difference in battery life is important but the pro with 9 hours is already quite enough for most usage (but of course more is nice)
I personally am a big fan of the 11" which is a very unique machine, portable like an iPad but powerful enough for most things.
So depending how important portability is I would go for either 13" Pro or 11" Air.
I have a 15" pro and the battery life is straight awful. I get like 5-6 hours.
The biggest advantage IMO to the retina display is that you can change the resolution for more space. 1920x1200 mode on my 15" pro.
With a 13" screen does it really make sense to increase the resolution? kinda, so-so. I personally wouldn't be happy with bad battery life and heavy weight for a small screen. On the flip-side I could justify it for great battery life.
LOL. I know I'm dating myself but I remember laptops from ~10 years ago that were said to have good battery life if they could last for 3 hours. 5+ hours would have been jaw-dropping back then.
At one point I bought a netbook that lasted 1.5 hours on a charge. That was considered "acceptable" since it "only" weighed about 3 lbs.