Why the 13″ Air Is Better Than the 13″ Pro | Hacker News Reader

Why the 13″ Air Is Better Than the 13″ Pro

brooksreview.net

7 pointsshowngo15 comments

Or do what I did, drop a shiny new SSD and more RAM in your 15" MacBook Pro 2007. Yeah, I'm cheap, but I also know there will be shinier things in the next 6-12 months. For ~$300 I get the performance of a brand new MacBook Air (same C2D chip, but faster, actually) without breaking the bank. Granted, its not as portable and all that jazz, but it works for my immediate needs.

I dropped 4Gb of RAM and a 128GB OCZ SSD into my 2008 15" Macbook Pro (2.4GHz core 2 duo).

Didn't stop me replacing it with a 13" Macbook Air and not looking back. The MBA has the same RAM, double the SSD capacity (I went large), same pixel count, and weighs about half as much. It also has about 50% greater battery life and feels screamingly faster.

I surmise that enough of the GUI is running on the GPU that the significantly higher core count in the GeForce 320M is responsible for a chunk of the speed-up -- and the MBA's SATA-II bus running at up to 3gbps seems to be just a little nippier than the 2008 MBP with a 1.5gbps SATA-I controller and an older SSD.

I just dropped a Crucial RealSSD into my wife's 2007 white macbook. After using it a bit, I noticed it was as snappy or snappier than my Air 11". I did some benchmarking and lo and behold it matched or beat my air all across the board. The only thing that didn't stack up was the memory benchmarks, which makes sense because the Air is DDR3. Since I no longer lug my Air to school everyday and her old machine is just as quick, I'm actually going to sell the Air and get an iMac.

The Air lacks the all-important keyboard backlight. That alone makes the MBP the winner in my book. There's also the fact that if you want to do something requiring more RAM and/or CPU, it also has a performance edge.

I thought I would miss my backlit keyboard, but after 6 months... It only occasionally crosses my mind. Life goes on.

Let's look at the specs:

    Air 13" $1,299.00
    1.86GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
    2GB memory
    128GB flash storage1
    NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics

    Pro 13" $1,299.00 ($1,449.00 with SSD)
    2.3GHz dual-core
    Intel Core i5
    4GB 1333MHz
    320GB 5400-rpm
    Intel HD Graphics 3000

The Pro has more memory, a better CPU, a DVD drive and an SD card slot.

The Air also has an SD card slot, and I never knew that was a make-or-break feature on a laptop.

Here's the one spec that makes a noticeable difference to me every single day, the one that was even bigger of a deal than upgrading to an SSD for the first time (and living through double digit SSD failures in the span of less than two years):

MacBook Air 13" Weight: 2.9 pounds (1.32 kg)

MacBook Pro 13" Weight: 4.5 pounds (2.04 kg)

Read the article. That argument is addressed and dismissed. This is about experience, not specs.

I bought a 13" max spec air right after the new Pro came out, really happy with it thus far. I will say it's not as much of a desktop replacement as the pro might be but it gets the job done. The higher resolution is very noticeable when you step down to 1280.

The macbook air has an 800MHz frontside bus, which isn't even fast enough to take advantage of last-generation SSD performance.

You would get better performance from the unibody macbook and a 3rd party SSD (1066MHz fsb), and even better performance with the macbook pro and the latest generation of SSD (2.5GT/s Intel DMI).

And there's also no ethernet jack on the air, you're not going to get the same performance out of the usb ethernet adapter.

From the post:

> It’s not about performance specs, it about user experience and how people use their computers — most people just don’t do that many CPU intensive tasks on anything but an occasional basis.

That is me. I care about the fact that my 13" Air is thinner and lighter than the 13" MBP, which makes a noticeable difference over any kind of day no matter the ergonomically designed bag or purse I might be using. I care that my 13" Air can run everything I need at acceptable or better performance, be it Xcode 4 or raiding with 24 other people in WoW. I don't care that I can't get the best performance possible or that there is no ethernet port or optical drive as those are edge cases at best and workarounds exist. It does what I want and feels incredible in every way that matters to me at the same time, and the MBP can't. It's as simple as that.

I guess it depends on how you're using it - I don't really notice the weight in my backpack, and I don't walk around with my laptop otherwise.

Also from the post:

  While at the same time forgoing things that you will notice 
  every time you use the computer (screen resolution and the 
  performance of an SSD).

If the performance of the SSD is a main feature, why would it not also be an important feature if you could quadruple the MBA SSD speed with the MBP + latest SSD?

I suppose if you are one to consider that and other performance boosts a main feature, the MBP makes a lot more sense to purchase. I'm not saying that the Air works for all people for all reasons. It definitely shows when it's struggling with something, and this is why I have other machines to offload things to. I don't use the Air as a desktop replacement although I do about 80% of my work on it, and that might be key to this discussion. Performance trivialities are no big deal when I can easily just head home or to my office and use a cheaper-priced desktop that still blows any MBP out of the water.

> I guess it depends on how you're using it - I don't really notice the weight in my backpack, and I don't walk around with my laptop otherwise.

If there is one thing I really hate about being female, it's the inability to get away with walking around dressed nicely with a backpack on. But even when I do use backpacks, it's usually the case that 1.5lb and a slimmer laptop is nicer to have and I definitely notice the added weight and subsequent strain when I'm lugging around a work laptop or my 13" or 15" MBPs instead of the Air.

I have a 13" Pro with a Vertex2. My Dad's MB Air 13 feels faster (synthetic bench states mine is about 5-10% faster).

The weight difference is tangible. Once the Thunderbolt Air arrives, I'm switching.

> you're not going to get the same performance out of the usb ethernet adapter

3rd party gigabit USB adapters are surprisingly fast. They combine multiple ethernet packets into a single USB packet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com