Quote:
Originally Posted by pilotbob
My old MacBook White I use for lazy-boy surfing is showing it's age. Its a bit slow and the non-multi touch trackpad makes it no fun to use with Lion. And I have to keep it plugged in all the time cause the battery is shot.
I've been thinking of replacing my iMac with a MacMini and the MacBook with an iPad.
But based on your report, I am wondering if I should instead get a MBA 11 or 13 incher (rather than the Mini and iPad) and just hook it up to my monitor when I want to do programming or other work that begs for the big 24inch monitor.
The choices would be:
Mini vs MBA 11inch
2.3Ghz DualCore i5 vs 1.6Ghz DualCore i5
500GB drive vs 64GB ssd
$1100 (Mini + iPad) vs $1000
Of course even the 1.6 i5 should be faster than my iMac's 2.66 Core 2 Duo. But, I have 126GB of stuff on my iMac. I could probably off load some of it. I think a good portion of it is my iTunes library which is mostly video podcasts.
Decisions, decisions.
BOb
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Personally, I wouldn't go for the Mac mini. Granted, the new ones certainly will be way faster than my 2.5 years old one. But still, by far I find Mac mini the weakest Apple product. If you've got use for a mobile unit, I'd use MacBook Air and hook it up to a monitor when needed.
What I really love about MacBook Air: It only takes about the same space in my bags as a 10" tablet - but you can do so much more on it.
And just look at the size of it, compared to iPad 2...
If I compare this to the 4cm fat notebooks I used to have a few years ago (although I did love my Toshiba Satellite 7 years ago)...
Re. performance: I've got a 3 year old iMac, 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo.
I haven't down any benchmarks. But that's not necessary, the difference in speed is pretty obvious. MBA beats my old iMac by lightyears.
Re. your 126GB of stuff: I've got about 20TB of data (bought > 1.000 iTunes movies over the years for example. Plus > 4.000 TV episodes. Plus maybe 500 BlueRay- and DVD Rips and so on). I add another FireWire HD from time to time, hook them all to my old Mac mini and use them within my network via filesharing. On my MBA I only have music and ebooks, nothing else. For that, the 256GB of MBA are enough.