Upgrade from early 2009 Macbook Pro to 2012 13" Air?

[detz]

I got the 17" Pro when I was doing iPhone work at home about 3 years ago and now I travel back and forth with my laptop every day so I'm thinking of swapping out my 17" for a 13" and having external displays at both locations. The only thing that worries me is the power, I don't want to go to a lesser system just for portability so I'm trying to figure out if the air will be slower in any way to my pro. My pro now has 8GB ram and a 300GB SSD but it's hard to compare since the tech has changed so much in three years.

Thoughts?

 

[awer25]

Retina model? It's a good compromise for portability and no compromise in power.

 

[Cliff3]

I got the 17" Pro when I was doing iPhone work at home about 3 years ago and now I travel back and forth with my laptop every day so I'm thinking of swapping out my 17" for a 13" and having external displays at both locations. The only thing that worries me is the power, I don't want to go to a lesser system just for portability so I'm trying to figure out if the air will be slower in any way to my pro. My pro now has 8GB ram and a 300GB SSD but it's hard to compare since the tech has changed so much in three years.

Thoughts?

I replaced my mid-2009 base model MBP (15.4", 2.53GHz, 8GB RAM, 250GB 5400 rpm HDD) with an optioned-out 13", and the new machine is noticably faster than the old one, and substantially lighter as well. In terms of geekbench scores, the new machine is about double the speed of the old one. About the only thing I wouldn't do with the MBA is encode video, but then I have an 8-core Mac Pro for that.

 

[Barna Biro]

The lat 2012 MBA 13" should surely be really close ( if not better ) to the performance of your 2009 MBP. Only thing you have to watch out for is the GPU... the MBP surely has a dedicated GPU while as the MBA doesn't...

Or as the person above me has already mentioned, you could maybe try giving the Retina Mabcook Pro a shot too... it's true that it's 15" in size, but a lot lighter and thinner and your current MBP ( and it will be a lot faster too ).

 

[jimboutilier]

I got the 17" Pro when I was doing iPhone work at home about 3 years ago and now I travel back and forth with my laptop every day so I'm thinking of swapping out my 17" for a 13" and having external displays at both locations. The only thing that worries me is the power, I don't want to go to a lesser system just for portability so I'm trying to figure out if the air will be slower in any way to my pro. My pro now has 8GB ram and a 300GB SSD but it's hard to compare since the tech has changed so much in three years.

Thoughts?

I would expect a 2012 AIR to feel significantly faster than a 2009 Pro. I had a 2009 15" MBP and my 2012 AIR definitely feels much faster. I do a lot of complex documents and spreadsheets and presentations along with some database work, VM work, PERL etc but don't use heavy duty graphics.

My wife has a 2011 15" MBP Quad Core with SSD all loaded up and a recent glitch put it in for service. She used my old 2010 MBA Ultimate for a few days and while she was frequently maxing out the cpu (dual core C2D vs Quad Core I7) she thought it felt very responsive and had no troubles getting her work done.

Mileage varies, but hopefully this helps

 

[Boyd01]

I went from a 2008 15" MBP c2d 2.4ghz/4GB to a 2011 13" MBA i5 1.6ghz/4GB and the difference is striking. The MBA is almost 2x faster for CPU bound tasks. Of course the SSD is a huge difference, but if you already have one in your MBP that might be less of a factor.

I have not had issues with the onboard graphics on the MBA vs the discrete graphics card in the MBP. My older versions of Final Cut Pro, VectorWorks, Photoshop and other pro apps all work fine and perform much better on the MBA. However, I used my time machine backup to move them from the MBP to the MBA. It would have been difficult if not impossible to install the old Final Cut Pro from the original DVD's because the installer would not have recognized the graphics card as compatible. And the old installer also needed Rosetta, which is not longer available in Lion.