Upgrade late 2011 Macbook Pro 13" or buy new Macbook Air?

While the newly announced MBA is pretty sweet you should only buy it if you just want a new computer. The only things about it that will significantly enhance your computing experience (other than the long battery life) can be added to your uMBP-13 for $200 or so.

The newer and/or higher end CPU isn't likely to make much of a difference at all other than the aforementioned battery life so don't worry that you got the Sandy Bridge i5.

The following 3 things will help:

1. SSD - Though a good hybrid drive would make a real difference on the OSX side, the caching algo will not likely give you a significant improvement for your Windows speeds.

2. 16GB - While 8GB is fine for light VM usage, if you are a moderate user, you might well be paging out.

3. If those two changes are not enough, go with a Bootcamp partition.

If you do choose to install another drive in your optibay, be aware that it may not run at SATA3 speeds reliably. In the 2011 uMBP-15 you must put a SATA2 drive in the optibay for reliable performance. I had thought that the 2011 uMBP-13s all had SATA2 in the optibay, in which case you can use a SATA3 drive, but it will max out at about 300MB/s (still 3x an HDD).


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I doubt that processor speed is a bottleneck for your use. A little time spent with Activity Monitor will tell you where your speed issues are. The only time I get page outs is when running Parallels with Windows. I have 8gb and it's fine when running only Mac apps. An SSD upgrade makes a huge difference.

 

That sounds like a good start and as glenthompson said, check "Activity Monitor" to see if you are swapping data to the hard drive because your are running out of RAM.

I strongly suspect the hard drive is the bottleneck in your case.

 

The painstaking slowness you describe is almost assuredly because of a lack of an SSD drive. RAM could be a factor, but storage IOPS (or lack thereof) is most definitely the main culprit.

You're essentially running two different workloads off the same physical disk. OS X and any apps it has open at the time, plus Windows in your VM and any apps it has open at the time.

The PCIe based SSD in the new AIR makes it a very attractive offering at this time for a laptop. I'm very curious to see what Apple has up its sleeve for the next MBP refresh, because if they move to PCIe SSD storage there as well, then things will get very interesting.

CPU speaking, the 1.7Ghz CPU in the new 13" AIR comes very close to matching the 2.9GHz CPU in the 13" rMBP for 64bit GeekBench scores. So, when compared against Sandy Bridge, it should be a bit faster. Real world, I would expect the new AIR to be very close to performance of the current 13" MBP when you account for the SSD changes along with the new CPU. This is another interesting tidbit, and something that hints at a nice boost with the next MBP refresh.

Between upgrading a 2011 13" MBP and buying a 2013 13" AIR, the only reasons I would choose the MBP is if I needed more than 8GB of RAM and/or if cost was a major factor.

 

not sure if you're into photography, but color representation is better on the MBPs, albeit lower res than the MBA - that is why I would never trade up my MBP (I have the same one as you) for an air. sure, the 13" has lower resolution than I'd like, but it's a compromise I'm willing to live with for the color gamut and portability. I have a 15" for work and even though the resolution is a lot better there, the physical size is too big for my liking. I'm planning on throwing in a crucial m500 480gb SSD as soon as it drops below $350 or $300, or whenever my patience runs out

 

BTW, here are the Geekbench benchmarks for those models, i7 vs i5 makes a difference for processing speed on the new MBAs, otherwise pretty similar to what you have already:

MacBook Pro (13-inch Late 2011)
Intel Core i5-2435M 2400 MHz (2 cores)
6026

MacBook Air (13-inch Mid 2013)
Intel Core i5-4250U 1300 MHz (2 cores)
5946

MacBook Air (13-inch Mid 2013)
Intel Core i7-4650U 1700 MHz (2 cores)
7284

 

I have exactly the same problem with my macbook pro late 2011.

The air is slightly faster than the pro but...
- it last 2-3 times longer (12 hours)
- it's 2 times lighter at 1.3kg
- graphic card intel 5000 allows it to render games much better
- it's also less noisy

With the macbook air I also should be able to carry my laptop everywhere thanks to its weight.

Seems like a no brainer to me. Just hoping to find a good deal and I'll get this new machine