I was looking at the new MacBook Pros ( I'm in the market) and I saw an epic pricing fail. You can get: 11-inch : 128GB 1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor 2GB memory 128GB flash storage1 NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics Ships: Within 24hrs Free Shipping $1,199.00 This the MacBook Air. OR: 13-inch: 2.3 GHz 2.3GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 4GB 1333MHz 320GB 5400-rpm1 Intel HD Graphics 3000 Built-in battery (7 hours)2 $1,199.00 So, what would you rather have? 2 inches of screen space Double the GHz double the RAM Double the hard drive space Cool new Thunderbolt port 2hrs more battery life OR .3 inches of width 243% less weight 10 seconds faster boot up
It depends. Some people would, but if your laptop spends more time traveling than sitting somewhere, you'd appreciate the lesser weight. And 1.4 GHz is enough for most people if they just do internet and word processing.
Yeah, the Air sucks. Macbook Pros aren't heavy anyway, and if you're the kind of person that thinks they are then you need one even more, it'll replace some of that fat with muscle.
The MacBook Pro still only weighs around 4.5 pounds, which isn't terribly bad, and from past experience, the less it weighs, the less carefully you handle it. And I don't think I could live with only 128 gigs of hard drive space.
I'm not saying it's a good value for you. But imagine someone who carries their laptop around every day, and only browses the web. They wouldn't need a fast processor or a huge HD, and the MacBook Pro would be a waste of power.
It's just not the Air that boasts those loading times. It is because OS X is so much more lightweight than Windows. And since the Pro has better specs, it should actually boot faster, but I'm not 100% sure.
I see your point, but if I only used my laptop for web browsing, I would still try to get the best bang for my buck. I wouldn't buy a 1200 dollar laptop for web browsing only either.
Actually it's the Air's flash storage. Here is a comparison video between a Pro Core i7 2.66GHz vs Air Core 2 Duo 1.86GHz: I'm not saying that everyone will care about boot times and whatnot, but seeing as how successful the Macbook Air has become since it's latest update, I think it's safe to say that their pricing isn't a 'fail'.
The Air is still better because it has a Geforce 320M, whereas the 13-inch MBP now uses the Intel HD3000 which is comparable to the GeForce 310M. Plus, it has a 128 GB SSD, which is leaps and bounds faster over the 5400 RPM 320 GB HDD in the 13-inch.
I'd avoid anything with Intel graphics personally they might be reasonably ok but if it isn't ATI or NVIDIA it's automaticly on my avoid list. But if you don't game much it might be worth living with for the other specs.
I was gonna say the same thing. You're spoiling yourself buying anything that expensive just for web browsing. The differences aren't too vast unless you're heavily into gaming, in which case you should be using a desktop anyway. HDD speed is pretty much a non-issue for most people, none of them are slow, you don't need the extra speed for 99% of daily activities so spending money on it seems pointless unless you've bought the entire thing specifically for that 1%.
I probably couldn't disagree more even if I tried to. The fact is that apart from gaming and 3D work most laptops today are more than fast enough to do just about "anything" in real time. The one big bottleneck is actually the save/load speed which puts a few seconds on top of ever saved document/launched app etc. I have the MacBook Air 11" myself and find that for most practical purposes it actually feels faster than my Quad 3.0 GHz XEON Mac Pro with a RAID 0 boot-drive and 16 GB's of memory. I bought it to use while commuting but find that it is by far the machine I use the most. Even when compiling the increased save-speed makes a huge difference, even though it obviously doesn't actually do the number-cruncihng as fast for larger projects.
If you consider save speed a bottleneck then you're in the 1% I mentioned. I work on fairly sizeable Photoshop documents and whatnot, and saving never takes more than a second or so at max on the lowest end Macbook. Dealing with seriously intensive 3D projects or code compiling puts you in the minority.
My point is that everyone saves/loads data while probably only 10-15% of the computer owning people in the world will ever run up against processor-limitations. They will simply never benefit from the horse-power their computers have under the hood. They will however feel those small time-saving operations every day, when booting, starting programs, saving documents etc.
