MacBooks

Lucas

OK, I have finally decided to get a MacBook/ MacBooc Air... But i cant decide which one to get. (Before anyone says, I need a MacBook/ Air for schooling) I love the idea of the portability on the Air but it does not have a disk drive for CD/DVD... But the macbook has the drive. I need to for high intensive coding but I also need it to be portable (I would not mind taking the Pro around but the Air is smaller). Please help me choose.

BlueSun

I'm curious, what class are you taking that requires a macbook?

As far as an answer goes, if you're going to be using it at school, it's imperative to have a machine with good battery life that's fast and fairly lightweight. You'll get that with the Air.

I wouldn't worry about not having the CD/DVD drive, because honestly, how often do you really use it? Especially in a laptop.

If you need something off a CD or DVD, you could always use an external drive or the shared optical drive in another system.

stitch

My 13" MBP suits me fine in terms of portability and speed. The battery is enough to probably last you *most* of the day (I get like 5hr these days) but take the charger incase.

gdea73

I think the Air is a good mobile client with good battery life / power consumption, which is key...

however I feel that unless you need something *that* small, and that simplified, I would go with the MacBook Pro. It really depends though, on its practical application, whether you're using it for performance applications ever or if it's simply a note-taking, web-browsing, word-processing machine.

I guess I'm naturally biased against netbooks to some degree, or computing that's simplified for the sake of simplicity and not performance, but at least Apple does this better than anyone else... the new Air is really quite fast with SSD technology etc., it's a good blend of portability and performance compared to other really small laptops/tablets.

dontabandonme

I think you need a pc with windows 7

Lucas

I already have 2 PC's with Win 7

dontabandonme

i actually take that back because the best program for a mac is Garageband

gdea73

So because there is GarageBand for OS X, all Windows-based PCs are useless? Nice reasoning

(just kidding). I have to say, after testing out the new Air at the Apple Store, Apple surely does wonders with such a small (13") screen. It's like 1366x768 res, and the multi-touch touchpad and Lion are better than I thought. And, of course, both the Pro and the Air are very shiny

stitch

dontabandonme wrote:

i actually take that back because the best program for a mac is Garageband

You obviously haven't used Logic yet.

GDEA73 wrote:

So because there is GarageBand for OS X, all Windows-based PCs are useless? Nice reasoning

(just kidding). I have to say, after testing out the new Air at the Apple Store, Apple surely does wonders with such a small (13") screen. It's like 1366x768 res, and the multi-touch touchpad and Lion are better than I thought. And, of course, both the Pro and the Air are very shiny

I love my MBP although I completely loathe Lion. Specifically the rubber band effects. Get rid of that and I could probably use it, but I don't see that happening.

BlueSun

Rubber band effects?

Looks like you're not alone, assuming you're talking about the same thing:

http://gdgt.com/question/is-there-a-way ... -lion-fa2/

stitch

URL's not loading for me but it does look like it is the same thing. Basically any scrollable NSView can have that bounce effect as seen on iOS. I find it more annoying than anything. Should at least be optional...

BlueSun

Apparently, it is optional. Here's a quote since you can't load the site:

It looks like this particular option is in the Universal Access preferences panel.

1. Open Universal Access panel in System Preferences.
2. Click the "Mouse & Trackpad" tab
3. Click the "Trackpad Options..." or the "Mouse Options..." tab (or both).
4. Make sure the "Scrolling" checkbox is checked.
5. Change the drop down from "with inertia" to "without intertia"
6. Close system preferences, no more rubber-band effect.

Screenshot of pref pane: cl.ly­/0f3q0R1m3v0L2Q2D3T18

*HUGE CAVEAT*: This also disables the smooth, variable speed intertial scrolling that many of us have grown to love in prior versions of OS X. Sadly, it appears that the only answer is all or nothing.

dontabandonme

GDEA73 wrote:

So because there is GarageBand for OS X, all Windows-based PCs are useless? Nice reasoning

(just kidding). I have to say, after testing out the new Air at the Apple Store, Apple surely does wonders with such a small (13") screen. It's like 1366x768 res, and the multi-touch touchpad and Lion are better than I thought. And, of course, both the Pro and the Air are very shiny

vm

bugmenott

The MBA 13" is actually 1440x900. The 11" is 1366x768

Duke1010

I love my new macbook pro but Lion doesn't let you use power pc applications, like virtual pc 2007 but I use VM Ware for my virtual machines now

noone

1366x768? Holy hell that's a odd resolution.

BlueSun

That's not odd at all, actually.

It's my current resolution on both my desktop (I need to get a bigger monitor) and my laptop. I thought it was odd at first as well, but I've since seen it on various laptops and TVs...

Lupinthe3rd

1366x768 has pretty much become the standard resolution of most screens these days. Especially on cheaper LCD screens.

nightice

16:10 resolutions are disappearing, that's why.

stitch

Duke1010 wrote:

I love my new macbook pro but Lion doesn't let you use power pc applications, like virtual pc 2007 but I use VM Ware for my virtual machines now

The last VPC for OS X was version 6 iirc. I do not know why you would want to run a PPC VMM on x86 hardware anyway, you'd be translating x86 instructions to powerpc instructions to x86 again.