MacBook Air Anyone?

What is on Your Mind?
1

I am thinking to purchase a new MacBook Air, 13 inch.

Anyone have a MacBook Air? What do you think about it? Seems expensive, a bit. Is it worth it?

2

I was toying between that and an MBP 15", and went for the MBP in the end.

Main reasons where

  • Extra oomph of the quad core i7, extra memory and Radeon 1GB GPU
  • More ports and internal optical drive
  • Larger storage
  • Larger screen
  • Thought it would handle better under load
  • Bang for your buck

My friend, however (an Oracle DBA) went for the 13" Air and says it's great. Incredibly snappy and responsive (think he says it boots in 12 seconds, and has a great battery life). He's got VM Fusion installed, has Linux (CentOS or Mint, I don't recall) and will install Oracle in it. I wait to see his impressions of how "snappy" it is when all that's running!

The Air is expensive. The base model comes with only 2 GB, and the optical drive is extra. But it is really light - great for travelling, and the display is better than the 13" MBP.

It's a gorgeous little thing, and had I not needed the extra "oomph" I absolutely would have gone for one of them.

3

Duel booting MacOS and Linux or just running Linux (wiped MacOS)?

4

Neither. Linux running Oracle in a VM.

The 4GB Air handles it pretty well, but under heavy load I would imagine the MBP would deliver better performance.

The Air is a great machine - if overpriced, but it depends what you want to use it for. If you need the extra grunt I'd go for the Pro.

5

Thanks.

I ended up ordering the MBA with upgraded RAM and CPU from the Apple Store. Will pick up next week while on a trip to Singapore.

6

You won't regret it :smiley:

I was babbling on about needing "oomph" and "grunt", and just though to myself the only things I've really used so far are Evernote, Dropbox and Safari, which don't need either :smiley:

7

I am happy because my big iMac is one of the old PPC ones, so it will be great to be on Intel architecture. I might even install the Andriod SDK now and try my hand some simple Andriod App :smiley:

It is impressive how light the 13 inch MBA is.... thanks again for helping me in the decision making process!

8

Picked up my new MBA in Singapore today.

Very nice!!!

9

Its SSD in action. I would not be surprised to find that for most casual users the Air delivers a snappier experience than a MBP. For someone who doesn't often run cpu/gpu intensive tasks, the faster storage (fast boot, swift suspend/resume, quick app launching) would have more impact.

Now, Oracle on Linux on VMWare on OSX ... perhaps not so casual :wink:

Regards,
Alister

---------- Post updated at 03:42 PM ---------- Previous update was at 03:40 PM ----------

Enjoy.

10

Yeah! I bought the fully loaded MBA and it boots lightening fast. I've never seen anything like it. I'll post back just how fast.......

---------- Post updated at 15:54 ---------- Previous update was at 15:51 ----------

Wow! Boots in around 8 seconds... fully connected to WiFi when up... that means less than 10 seconds to go from cold and dark to booted and on the net. Very impressive!