[ammar577]

I am planning to buy a new MBA in July, but i really want the 11" money is not an issue for me but size is. i want to replace my 2009 13" macbook pro which has a 250 GB hard disk. my primary use is for Movies, Photos and work ( emails, and MS OFFICE), after two years of using my MBP i notice im only using 95 GB out of 250. im avoiding the 13" MBA because if its size. i take my computer every where with my with my ipad and slr camera. and i stream my movies to my ipad using AirVideo which is perfect. please advise me should i go for the 11 MBA ultimate or 13" MBA ultimate?
im hopping when apple updates them in June or July they might increase the HD space for the 11" MBA do you think it could happen ?

i have following your posts for a while and i really need your advise guys



Ammar

[aepple]

I would wait, seems like a New Updated MacBook Air will be introduce in the next few months, i have the 13 inch which is great, both 11 and 13 are MOBILE, my 13 inch goes in my back-pack that i carry around easily.

[Atheist]

I went with the 13". The 11" screen is tiny. At only 768 pixels in height I find it almost useless. Constant scrolling to do anything.

[ammar577]

Thanks guys,

i will wait for the latest update on the MBA "11 and upgrade using OWC 240 GB SSD

that should convert the apple baby to a Beast
and completely replace my Macbook pro for at least 2 years till i upgrade again



Ammar

[OreoCookie]

You may not need the OWC upgrade, Apple has upgraded its SSDs, some achieve a throughput of around 260 MB/s/210 MB/s (read/write) as opposed to 210 MB/s/185 MB/s. This is pretty close to the absolute best of what you can get from affordable SATA SSDs.

[SierraDragon]

What Oreo said, there will probably be no need to upgrade from Apple's SSD. The Apple SSD in my 2011 MBP is sweet. I will no doubt upgrade it as tech improves and prices fall (have in every other laptop I have owned), but not until after the warranty year is up.

However do note that no MBA has qualified as a "beast" and it is unlikely that the Sandy Bridge MBAs will either. Fast on easy apps (SSD helps all types of apps a lot) and very aesthetic if you can tolerate the glossy display, but not a beast unless they reintroduce the Dock.

I cannot say enough good things about SSD performance. Running Aperture, a most demanding app, on multi-GB-sized batches of RAW image files I am constantly blown away by the combined performance of SSD, GPU and CPU of the 17" 2011 MBP.

Personally I need more screen real estate from a laptop than an MBA provides, but even so I really look forward to seeing the Sandy Bridge MBAs. I expect them to be very cool.

-Allen

[OreoCookie]

@SierraDragon
I agree with the sentiment that Sandy Bridge-based AirBooks won't challenge the current crop of MacBook Pros. However, I think it will be a significant boost and I expect them to be on par with 2009 MacBook Pros in terms of performance, perhaps even better. (I wonder how fast they will be compared to my 2010 Core i5 MacBook Pro.)

Unless you're doing something very cpu intensive (I'm also an Aperture addict ), MacBook Airs can actually be significantly faster than harddrive-based MacBook Pros in most tasks. Think Mail, launching apps, loading files, etc.

[SierraDragon]

Originally Posted by OreoCookie 

...MacBook Airs can actually be significantly faster than harddrive-based MacBook Pros in most tasks. Think Mail, launching apps, loading files, etc.

Yup. IMO HD for boot drives are a defunct idea. And so far everything I see with Sandy Bridge is that it is just a nice chip implementation. No reason to think the ULV MBAs will be otherwise.

Personally I am too lazy to try to differentiate among the parts of the 2011 Sandy Bridge/GPUs/SSDs architecture but overall the 2011 Macs are IMO the sweetest ever, by a lot (think well balanced) - and I have been buying/managing Macs since the 128k boxes. My previous champ was the 2006 Mac Pro.

-Allen

[ajprice]

New MacBook Air production rumored to begin this month | TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

New Air production will apparently start this month, the article talks about ULV versions of i5 and i7 being in it? I've not heard of these versions of the i series processors, how fast are they likely to be in comparison to MacBook Pro and iMac systems?

[SierraDragon]

All modern Macs are "fast" on simple workflows and IMO new MBAs will continue the trend. Comparative performance is really about how specific apps and workflow perform with a given setup's CPU/GPU/RAM/i/o. Aperture will show lessened performance, for instance, on a box with weak GPU while Photoshop will work fine.

Most users of new MBAs not coming from SSD setups will no doubt rave about how "fast" they are.

-Allen

[OreoCookie]

Originally Posted by ajprice 

New Air production will apparently start this month, the article talks about ULV versions of i5 and i7 being in it? I've not heard of these versions of the i series processors, how fast are they likely to be in comparison to MacBook Pro and iMac systems?

That depends on which MacBook Pro you're comparing it to. Just to give you an impression how fast Sandy Bridge is: the slowest Sandy-bridge based 13" Core i5 MacBook Pro (= current model) is faster than the fastest MacBook Pro of the last generation (15" or 17"). Even though we don't know yet how fast Sandy Bridge-based Airs will be, I think they will compare favorably to anything based on a Core 2 Duo.

[SierraDragon]

The AnandTech comments are right on:

"...for the first time since I've been reviewing Apple hardware we have portable Macs that can truly hang with their desktop brethren (with some caveats of course). In order to truly bridge the mobile/desktop gap you definitely need an SSD; a 2.5" hard drive just isn't going to cut it...

...I suspect that for even desktop users a 15-inch MacBook Pro paired with an external display may be near perfect. I believe this is a big reason for pushing Thunderbolt in this generation. While the standard may not really take off until next year, the new 15-inch MBP is definitely built for desktop replacement usage models and for that to work without sacrifice you need high speed external storage."

However, casual readers should take care not to interpret AnandTech's "Aperture 2 RAW Import Performance" chart as necessarily implying some relationship to real overall Aperture performance.

• Aperture Version 2 was tested. Version 3 made substantial speed changes and has been out for more than a year.

• How Masters and Previews are handled are not specified, and will have significant impact on performance.

• The RAW import rate reported by itself is a fairly unimportant measure and appears to be highly dependent on drive performance (RAW import rates may or may not correlate well with overall performance; that would be an interesting correlation to investigate) and varies based on Aperture settings. AnandTech did not specify which hard drives they used, but my 2.2 GHz 17" MBP with SSD imports straight RAW 12 MB NEFs at about 5 images per second as compared to the 2-3 images per second in the AnandTech graph; OTOH if I import RAW+JPEG using the camera JPEGs for Previews the rate is better than 10 images per second. Full import processing with my workflow takes a bit under a second per image.

In my case Aperture (3.1.2) on the 2011 17" MBP (OS 10.6.7, 8 GB RAM) with Apple's SSD imports 3 GB of RAW+JPEG images in much less than a minute and has those images fully processed in about 5 minutes. IMO hella fast. And edits (with both the Aperture Library and referenced Masters on the SSD) are essentially instant.

-Allen

[macboy94]

good idea!

[Young Spade]

I'd definitely go for the 13 inch Air if it's between the two, however, as others have stated, the new Airs should be coming out any minute now. If this is true it would be best to wait for the release and go from there. Both have full sized keyboards and will be just as fast if not faster due to the SSDs (depending on what you're doing of course) but you shouldn't be disappointed.

From current standards though, the 13 inch has longer battery life, something a lot of people miss when comparing the two.

[Waragainstsleep]

The current 11" is a disposable toy with 2GB RAM in it. I suspect an iPad would give better ROI. Get 4GB if you for that one.