Replacing 09 13" macbook pro with 11" air

[jdmar2004]

My wife really wants to get an 11" air because she prefers the laptop over our iPads but the old 13" weighs a ton. Our mbp has 8gb ram, 1tb storage, and is 65% full. My question is, how do I go about this? I know that I can't get 1tb in the air so I'm trying to figure out what would be the best setup. 90% of the time the mbp is docked bc we have the 27" Cinema Display. I recently started doing some video editing too so I'm wondering if the 11" with 4gb, 128 will struggle. I don't mind spending the extra money for 8gb ram but what should I do about storage? I was going to get Apple's time capsule but I'm not sure if it's ideal for video editing. I'm a little overwhelmed bc I'm no expert so any advice or examples of setups would be appreciated.

 

[OldITGeek]

I have a 15" rMBP and was travelling with that to put photos on.

Bought a 11" MBAir 8GB 512 SDD and use that now for travelling.
take my photos, copy them to the Air, when Home copy them to the rMBP.

While travelling have a full function notebook and I have Lightroom on it and the screen is calibrated, and use it for initial review of my photos.
I use a D800E and it has no problem dealing with those large files in Lightroom.

Down side is that you need to bring an SD reader or USB to connect the camera.

Works great for me

 

[motrek]

My wife really wants to get an 11" air because she prefers the laptop over our iPads but the old 13" weighs a ton. Our mbp has 8gb ram, 1tb storage, and is 65% full. My question is, how do I go about this? I know that I can't get 1tb in the air so I'm trying to figure out what would be the best setup. 90% of the time the mbp is docked bc we have the 27" Cinema Display. I recently started doing some video editing too so I'm wondering if the 11" with 4gb, 128 will struggle. I don't mind spending the extra money for 8gb ram but what should I do about storage? I was going to get Apple's time capsule but I'm not sure if it's ideal for video editing. I'm a little overwhelmed bc I'm no expert so any advice or examples of setups would be appreciated.

I'm guessing the Cinema Display doesn't have USB 3.0, which is a bummer, because you can get many super-cheap small portable external drives with huge storage capacity and you wouldn't notice a difference in performance between that and your internal MBP drive that you have now.

If you plug one of these drives in via USB 2.0, you will be limited to a maximum of ~25 MB per second bandwidth. That might not be great for video editing but there's no harm in trying, I guess.

I would avoid a Time Capsule as auxiliary storage. They seem super expensive to me for the amount of storage you get, they're not as portable as a cheap external drive (if you're interested in that), plus you probably already have a wifi router, plus I don't know how OS X and the Time Capsule interact with each other but it seems more general-purpose to just have a regular external drive.

 

[jdmar2004]

It's a real bummer that the display isn't USB 3 but I really don't want to buy a new one. I think I'll just get my wife the base air which will suit her needs. I'll put a 128gb SSD in the 13" for my home folder and move my HDD into the optical bay.

 

[mad3inch1na]

I'm guessing the Cinema Display doesn't have USB 3.0, which is a bummer, because you can get many super-cheap small portable external drives with huge storage capacity and you wouldn't notice a difference in performance between that and your internal MBP drive that you have now.

If you plug one of these drives in via USB 2.0, you will be limited to a maximum of ~25 MB per second bandwidth. That might not be great for video editing but there's no harm in trying, I guess.

I would avoid a Time Capsule as auxiliary storage. They seem super expensive to me for the amount of storage you get, they're not as portable as a cheap external drive (if you're interested in that), plus you probably already have a wifi router, plus I don't know how OS X and the Time Capsule interact with each other but it seems more general-purpose to just have a regular external drive.

The MBA has USB 3.0 though, so they could still run external drives, even if it was a little less convenient.

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It's a real bummer that the display isn't USB 3 but I really don't want to buy a new one. I think I'll just get my wife the base air which will suit her needs. I'll put a 128gb SSD in the 13" for my home folder and move my HDD into the optical bay.

The 4GB/128GB model is more than enough for most tasks, and you can even do some photo editing on it. It isn't perfect, and extra RAM/storage would help, but it is relative to your needs. As a consumer, 4GB/128GB is more than enough for me. It will be significantly faster than the 2009 MBP one way or the other.

Matt

 

[jdmar2004]

Went ahead and picked up the base 11 mba for the wife and the airport time capsule. Ill be ordering a good external hard drive that ill use for my video and photo editing on the 11 mba. I also plan on getting a good machine with the next update and I'll probably go ahead and get rid of my 09 MBP. I'm in no hurry because I'm only editing home videos in my spare time, which i don't have much of.