My Personal Experience With MBP vs Air

Jaguarr40

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I went to Best Buy over the weekend and looked at the MBP Retina and non and also looked at the Air. While i loved them all I settled that when I decide to pull the trigger it would be the 13" MBP non retina only because of space and really the only negative I could find with what I chose was that I did not like the 5400RPM speed of the drive. In order to get 7200 I would have to do a custom configure which to me defeats the great price I can get.

What is everyone elses opinion?
 

Jaguarr40

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I suppose the point I was trying to make while I like your ideas of a swap I might as well do custom through Apple and let them put in a 7200.
 

ledZERO

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Don't buy your mac from bestbuy or the apple store, micro center you get them for 100 to 150 dollars cheaper and they have better warranties
 

Jaguarr40

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True. But with the swap and a USB hard drive enclosure for the drive you take out, you now have a drive to use for Time Machine.

Just trying to save you some money so if you get the 5400 drive now, you can swap it later if its too slow. Yes, it adds hassle. FYI…since Apple considers the hard drive user-serviceable it does not void your warranty to change the hard drive.
So Karen remember Newbie on Mac learning so bare with me... I am being thrown when you say "With the swap and a USB HD enclosure that is what I am not getting... Sorry. Then where you say i would have a drive for time machine i am just trying to put this all together to process. Thank you for your help.

PS Ok I Just got it in a HD enclosure to place the drive I remove for an extra drive for storage. Now i got it. Then I can just swap myself for a faster drive. What is your opinion on the 5400 vs 7200 in a MacBook?
 

Fausty82

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So Karen remember Newbie on Mac learning so bare with me... I am being thrown when you say "With the swap and a USB HD enclosure that is what I am not getting... Sorry. Then where you say i would have a drive for time machine i am just trying to put this all together to process. Thank you for your help.

PS Ok I Just got it in a HD enclosure to place the drive I remove for an extra drive for storage. Now i got it. Then I can just swap myself for a faster drive. What is your opinion on the 5400 vs 7200 in a MacBook?

Not Karen, but I can chime in here, too. Obviously the 7200 drive will generally perform faster... but even the 5400 with a decent cache will still do nicely. The higher speed can generate extra heat within the MBP, so that’s a consideration. However, if speed is your primary option, go with the faster drive. SSD is fastest, then 7200, then 5400. But you must consider what you will be using the MBP for... if it’s primarily email, surfing the internet, wordprocessing, etc, it won’t matter that much. If you’re doing memory intensive stuff which will require a lot of paging and disk intensive operations, then it will make a big difference.
 
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localhost8080

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I used to have a 17" MBP. I got it custom specced with a 7200rpm drive in it.
after about a year I upgraded it to an SSD. Now I would never have a machine without an ssd inside.

I changed to a macbook air after id had the pro for 2.5 years because I didnt like having to carry the heavy MBP with me.
the air is fantastic. its just as fast as the MBP was and its the thinnest and lightest machine I've had.

I think that form now on my personal preference is to have a nice, fast, thin macbook air with a huge battery life.
sure, the harddrive doesnt have as much capacity, but you can get 2tb NAS drives and have them automount on login so that you can store all your big files on them and not have to sacrifice with the speed.

I also got itunes match as soon as it came out, so now I dont need to have all my music on my air which saves a load of space too!
 

jsntrenkler

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I upgraded my Macbook Pro with a SSD and 8 Gigs of Ram ... Sucker just flies!!! It amazes me how fast it is, I feel great turning it off when not in use as it boots up so quickly. I am looking forward to the new Macbook air as it has slightly higher resolution screen and will be lighter in the bag, aside from those two points the Macbook Pro has been solid, even if the battery life is only 7 hours (Still makes it through entire business meetings)