Suggestion on my first Mac

[avengerzx9]

All,

I am in the process of acquiring a Mac to do some Xcode programming for iOS. I need suggestion on which macbook I should get. I've already have a quad core desktop and a i7 core PC laptop for heavy duty processing work. So this mac will be mainly used for coding Xcode & web development, presentation, maybe sometime running a windows program in a pitch, and serve the web.

I am torn between either the Macbook Air and Macbook Pro. I enjoy the Macbook Air's mobility, but been reading display and other problems within the forum. Also, with the Macbook Air, I may have to upgrade to 4 GB RAM, which means an additional $100 or so and having to order from Apple.com. As for Macbook Pro, I know the refresh is coming, but with the MicroCenter deal, I can get one the 2.4 Ghz version for $999, which is close to $400 difference if I was to get a compariable 13" Air w/4GB.

One thing that puzzle me is that some people are saying 4 GB is not enough for them on the Macbook Pro when running some simple program, yet others are saying everything is so smooth running on a 2GB Air.

Anyway, any comments will be welcome

 

[r0k]

All,

I am in the process of acquiring a Mac to do some Xcode programming for iOS. I need suggestion on which macbook I should get. I've already have a quad core desktop and a i7 core PC laptop for heavy duty processing work. So this mac will be mainly used for coding Xcode & web development, presentation, maybe sometime running a windows program in a pitch, and serve the web.

I am torn between either the Macbook Air and Macbook Pro. I enjoy the Macbook Air's mobility, but been reading display and other problems within the forum. Also, with the Macbook Air, I may have to upgrade to 4 GB RAM, which means an additional $100 or so and having to order from Apple.com. As for Macbook Pro, I know the refresh is coming, but with the MicroCenter deal, I can get one the 2.4 Ghz version for $999, which is close to $400 difference if I was to get a compariable 13" Air w/4GB.

One thing that puzzle me is that some people are saying 4 GB is not enough for them on the Macbook Pro when running some simple program, yet others are saying everything is so smooth running on a 2GB Air.

Anyway, any comments will be welcome

First of all, let me say 2 gig is plenty. It depends on what you are doing. If you are doing xcode development a MBA should do fine. If you want to do image processing and movie editing, you might opt for a MBP mainly to get more storage and less urgently to get more RAM. More RAM is almost always a good thing but on OS X, more RAM is not a necessity unless you are doing RAM intensive tasks like editing a 16 megapixel 24 bit image in RAW format in photoshop or transcoding a 1080p video

The reason there are differing opinions out there about how much RAM is enough is people are doing different stuff with their machines. One possible reason to consider more RAM is if you plan to run virtualization such as virtualbox, parallels or vmware, you might want more RAM so Windows or Linux or whatever you are running under virtualization has more RAM without taking away from your main OS.

hope this helps...

 

[avengerzx9]

r0k, thanks for the reply.

Definitely not trying to start the whole 2GB vs 4GB, since that is about 20 thread about that already. I have never code under the OSX environment before, but I have done quite a bit of work within Visual Studio, and VS does use a lot of RAM, most of my instances within VS takes about 200 MB minimum and I usually have to open up multi VS instances.

I probably will not be doing Photoshop work on this, but will be doing some web development within Dreamweaver and others.

I think the MBP is a great deal right now, but from the benchmark I've seen thus far, it looks to be even slower than the MBA 1.86 2GB unless it is doing Photoshop Rendering and such. That is probably due to the SSD.

I do want to keep this computer for at least 3 years, so in terms of specs, MBP is definitely better, but MBA is better in terms of usability now.