Macbook Pro v Macbook Air

First you need to decide what are your priorities from your laptop going to be? In other words what tasks are you going to be using your laptop mainly for?

What is your budget ?

Unfortunately if you want super light there is a sacrifice involved. Its not as fast and powerful as say MacBook Pro 15” and it does not have so many extra’s like multiple USB ports and DVD / CD writer.

So what are you really wanting from a computer. If you are a serious gamer or do film editing, music production, or something that requires a good chunk of processor power then the MacBook Air is not for you. The MacBook Air has 11” and 13” versions which while super portable, light and handy are not great in terms of screen real estate to perform these tasks.

If however you do no more than email and surfing, possibly a bit of document writing and want a super light laptop you should definitely consider the MacBook Air.

The above reasoning has been simplified a little bit. Computers have different components that all work together and so they all contribute to the speed. So it is not just about how fast your processor is, or how much RAM but the sum of the parts.

There is one new and great piece of technology that is becoming more common and less expensive that does increase performance. The SSD drive otherwise known as the Solid State Drive. While it will not improve processor tasks such as a film render, boot times and data retrieval from the disk are much quicker. They are still a lot more expensive than a conventional SATA or IDE hard drive, but have the advantage that they are much faster, and have no moving components inside – so they can be used at high altitude for example. I mention this to show that a MacBook Air with a solid state drive as standard inside will be a pretty amazing machine !

Of course you can also put a Solid state hard drive in a MacBook pro and then we have a super computer ! This will not be for the faint of heart budget wise though especially if you go for the 512Gb SSD drive but thankfully SSD hard drive prices are getting cheaper and will continue to get cheaper.

11”

1.6 Core 2 Duo Processor

Maximum 4gb RAM

64 or 128 GB SSD Drive.

13”

1.7ghz Intel i5 Processor

Maximum 4gb Ram

128gb or 256 gb SSD drive.

Current Macbook Pro Specs

13”

2.3 or 2.7 Ghz Intel i3 or i7 Processor

320gb Hard drive upgradeable to 500gb or a max 750gb or SSD 128gb size upto 512gb

Maximum 8gb Ram

15”

2ghz Quad-core i7 / 2.2ghz i7 Quad / or 2.3ghz Quad i7

All available with 500gb Hard drive up to 750gb or SSD hard drives 128gb to 512gb

Maximum 8gb RAM.

Of course an obvious avenue is the Apple Website.  I would also recommend Ebay as you can sometimes find a Macbook Air or Macbook Pro a lot cheaper there.

Macbook Pro

The 13” Macbook pro starts at $1199 for a 2.3 i3,  to $1499 for the 2.7 i7.

and

the 15” series starts at $1799 - $3899 for a 512gb SSD 8gb RAM 2.3 I7 Quadcore Processor !

Macbook Air

Reasonably priced at $999 entry level all the way to $1799 for the top spec machine.