Specs help?

[MacAttackMark]

I don't think I can wait for the "possible" rMBP refresh, so I'm probably going to opt for the new 13" Air, in the next week or so.


I'm heading off to another year in college in August and I'm looking to hold on to this laptop for at least 4 years, and it will be my main. I'm a pretty heavy internet browser, streaming multiple videos, constantly refreshing pages and such. Along with that I also use Office (word, spreadsheet, and power point), itunes, I occasionally do some photo editing, but nothing major and rarely do video editing. I'm also very intrigued with Parallels and would be nice to dabble in that as well.

For the most part I was planning going with the basic necessities i5, 4GB Ram, and a nice 256 GB SSD.
Although from reading quite a bit of forums a lot of people are saying to completely max out the air since you can't upgrade it, and it would make it "future-proof", especially if it's your main.

I'm a little unsure if I'd want to do that, so advice and clarification would be great, Thanks!

 

[technowar]

Just get the 8GB RAM to make it more future proof.

 

[techn0lady]

Just get the 8GB RAM to make it more future proof.

seconded - for the extra 100 bucks or so you'll thank us for that advice. And besure to get the student discount at the educational store online - it's like a $100 savings.

 

[technowar]

So with student's discount, 8GB RAM is likely your base model. Lucky.

 

[MacAttackMark]

Any reasons why just the RAM? I'm also tempted to boost up the SSD, just to avoid an external drive, but then again that's costy.

 

[sk3tch]

Any reasons why just the RAM? I'm also tempted to boost up the SSD, just to avoid an external drive, but then again that's costy.

Perfect config is i5/256GB/8GB...but if you decide to stick with 128 - yeah...external.

 

[MacAttackMark]

Perfect config is i5/256GB/8GB...but if you decide to stick with 128 - yeah...external.

There's only about 20 GB of space left on my current 229GB dell inspirion, I'm terrible when it comes to backing things up so I'd like to have that extra memory. Also thanks for your opinion!

 

[technowar]

You can go for 128GB and buy yourself a 1 or 2TB external drive.

 

[falconeight]

Ram!

 

[sparkie7]

Any reasons why just the RAM? I'm also tempted to boost up the SSD, just to avoid an external drive, but then again that's costy.

why stop there? upgrade the CPU. go all the way. i'm sure that what you tell your gf

 

[MacAttackMark]

You can go for 128GB and buy yourself a 1 or 2TB external drive.

I personally would like more just for the insurance, more of a preference

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why stop there? upgrade the CPU. go all the way. i'm sure that what you tell your gf

haha funny . Though I wasn't really planning to upgrade CPU, any reasons why though?

 

[sparkie7]

I personally would like more just for the insurance, more of a preference

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haha funny . Though I wasn't really planning to upgrade CPU, any reasons why though?

as in your #1 post, you mentioned.. f u t u r e - p r o o f i n g

 

[bp1000]

I think future proofing is a fallacy.

The term was valid in the age of single core, moving part hard disks where software requirements far exceeded hardware capabilities.

Back then, only about 5 years ago there were bottlenecks. Present day, with dual and quad core, SSD the star of the show and faster RAM speeds, hardware capabilities have far exceeded software requirements, the roles have reversed.

Present day machines with solid state, dual core and faster ram have a lot in reserve. The ssd drives have such high read write that achieving the highest clock speed on the CPU pales into insignificance now. Software itself is actually getting more efficient, eg mavericks. With the emergence of iCloud, google docs and now iWork in the cloud I don't think it will be much longer before we are effectively thin clients where a lot of tasks are performed on the much wider cloud network where parallel processing and computation far outweighs what our single machines can do.

My 2011 i5 MBA feels as fast today as it did on day 1. I think with mavericks there is a long life ahead for it too.

I will be getting a 2013 air and that's the key, my desire to change will kick in much sooner than hardware requirements that fall below software expectations.