New MBA or Used 2012 MBA

[juhkob]

Hi. I'm looking to purchase a MBA and I would like to get the most bang for my (thousand) buck(s). I'm going to be doing lots of web development, internet browsing, Skyping, as well as using Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. I plan on using this at school frequently, as well as on-the-go and sometimes at home. I already have a 1tb external hard drive.

I was considering the new stock 13" MBA with 8gb of RAM for ~$1200. I like this because I hate charging things and it obviously has a decent performance boost.

However for $1000 I am able to get a used (like-new) 13" MBA from 2012 with 8gb of RAM on ebay. It even comes with the box.

These options are about the same from what I can tell. Obviously the newer one will be slightly more pristine. It will also have 5 hours longer advertised battery life and better performance. However, not ever owning a laptop (or a MacBook), I don't know if those benefits are worth the extra $200 price tag, so I'm looking for advice.

 

[marioman38]

Used 2011 or 2012 w/ 256GB SSD... that 128GB will fill up FAST

You'll want your iTunes library, and a lot of your apps, and dev documents local

 

[juhkob]

Used 2011 or 2012 w/ 256GB SSD... that 128GB will fill up FAST

You'll want your iTunes library, and a lot of your apps, and dev documents local

I don't have an iTunes library. Currently I'm running a Windows desktop with a 128gb SSD and I'm just fine on space

 

[marioman38]

Well then... Here ya go!

No tax!

 

[juhkob]

Well then... Here ya go!

No tax!

I went ahead and got an 8gb 2012 one off of ebay. It's been used but it looks brand new, its been reset to factory default settings, and it even comes with the box

Cheers!

(now I just need to get over the gaping hole in my wallet )

 

[marioman38]

May I be the first to welcome you to the Macbook Air family

If you are new to Mac, a couple of programs I find useful are:

1Password (strong password generator/manager)

iStat Menus (system monitor in menu bar)

Yummy FTP (best Mac FTP client IMHO)

Little Snitch (network monitoring/firewall)

SizeUP (window manager, like dragging windows to the edge in W7)

Tuxera NTFS
(read/write support for NTFS formatted disks)

smcFanControl (control your fan speeds)

UnRarX (extract RAR files)

and WhatSize (useful to find files taking up SSD space)