Specs help?

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.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Ram!

 

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

 

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

 

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.