13 inch MBA (4GB) Good enough for my needs?

[funkdoobi]

any 'designer' considering a 13 inch display as their main workhorse must not be very good. if you're serious, you'd get a 17 inch mbp and an 11.6 as your carry around.

 

[funkdoobi]

**LOL dude you are SO wrong this 13 ultimate air BLOWS my 13 or 15 MBP away in every way period! Its unbelievable, unless you are a computer programmer of course then the MBP is what you want anyone else would be more than happy with the air.

here's an example of the kind of person that knows nothing about computers.

 

[peapody]

lol!!

+1

 

[Corax]

Odd.

I did some test at an Apple store launching Garageband and I ran into beach balls. The i5 was faster with it's HDD. ( this was the 11"MBA however, but the MBA still had Flash instead of HDD )

So I find it a pretty funny statement if you think a MBA will blow away a 15" MBP i5/i7, especially if they will put in a SSD that is so fast, it saturates the SATA connection.

Well in the stores the 11" has the 1,4GHz C2D and 800MHz frontside bus.
That's a big difference with the 13" 2,13GHz C2D with 6MB shared cache and 1066MHz frontside bus (which the person you respond to mentions).

The Adobe set of software run smooth and easy on that machine, and on mine.
Garageband is also no pain, not even iMovie.

 

[johnnymg]

I guess the score does not tell the whole story.

Any one here have used program like Photoshop CS3+ on MBA 13 inch? How was it?

P.S For us, web designers, the PSD files usually will be around 5MB-30MB.

The xbench overall score is heavily weighted by disk performance and the HD in the base MBP is very slow.

A 13" MBP with a fast SSD and 8 GB of RAM will be significantly faster than a maxed out MBA. That's not an opinion, that's a fact. Additionally, you may have "page outs" with 4 GB of RAM on the MBA for large image files.

You should really review Lloyd's web site for specific performance issues dealing with CS: http://macperformanceguide.com/OptimizingPhotoshop-TestResults-MBP.html

AGAIN, you can use a MBA for the work you describe but there are much better tools available!

JohnG