Upgrade from Mid 2011 i5 11" to 2013 i7 11"

[illippinno]

Yet another should I, should I not, on the fence kind of thread I'm a graphic designer who is happy with the performance of my system for daily design use (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign) but like many of us, would like to have the latest and greatest.

I've been lurking around lately reading up on the release of the 2013 Airs, and coming from a Mid 2011 11" 1.6/i5/4gb, I'm really considering upgrading my system to the 2013 11" 1.7/i7/8gb.

A few perks that I obviously would gain is USB 3.0 (which would come in handy for me since I normally keep my work files on my external hard drive and work from there), and of course, the performance boost... My benchmark now is 5125, and I see the new 1.7/i7 receiving about 8373.

I'm not a big benchmark kind of guy, and am wondering if that is a substantial speed bump. Anyone else make the upgrade?

Thanks in advance!

 

[paulrbeers]

I upgraded from base 13" 2011 (so 1.7ghz i5) to the 13" 2013 w/ the i7. I really don't notice a lot of difference on day to day stuff. Boot up is a bit faster. Battery appears to be amazing. I really just needed the 8GB of RAM which is why I upgraded.

 

[illippinno]

Thanks for the feedback!

I think for me, the ram boost would also be the most beneficial for me as well.

I upgraded from base 13" 2011 (so 1.7ghz i5) to the 13" 2013 w/ the i7. I really don't notice a lot of difference on day to day stuff. Boot up is a bit faster. Battery appears to be amazing. I really just needed the 8GB of RAM which is why I upgraded.

 

[cyclotron451]

I just bought the 2011 MBA

as a refurb direct from Apple (the 2GB/64GB 11"). I'll be using it as an extreme test of the Mavericks RAM compression (on my 13" MBP this is working really well - and I think OSX10.9 will give a boost of life to the low RAM machines)

I will just use the 2011 MBA11" for missions/travel and word-processing. I would have loved the Haswell features instead of buying into the old Sandy Bridge MBA - but that would have cost me three hundred and fifty Euros more!