Giving up unibody macbook for macbook air - Is this a good idea???

[anirudh]

I have a unibody macbook, 2.4ghz, 4gb ram and 250gig hard drive. I am considering selling it for a rev c mb air with SSD. Is this a good idea? what kind of a performance degradation I am looking at here? Any help would be appreciated.

 

[ayeying]

Depends on what you do.

HD Videos all the time, keep the MacBook.
Virtual Machines all the time, keep the MacBook.
Regular surfing net, email, IM, nothing major, get the Air.

I went from a 17" uMBP (2.93ghz/8gb/256gb ssd) and 8-Core Mac Pro to a Rev C MacBook Air. Does all the stuff I need, not fast as the uMBP or MP but not insanely slow either.

 

[anirudh]

thank you for the help

is the a lot of difference between:

a. Rev B SSD model and Rev C SSD model?
b. Rev C HDD model and Rev C SSD model?

 

[jimboutilier]

I went from a 15" 2.2ghz/4/7K250 MBP to a RevA MBA a couple years ago and used the RevA MBA as my primary machine for about a year. It was slower but quite useable and because I travel I MUCH prefered it to the MBP.

After a while I got tired of fighting the 80gb HD barrier and for a while I was making much more extensive use of Virtual MAchines, so I transitioned to a new uMB 2.4/4/7K320. While the uMB was much faster and had plenty of capacity, I was never really happy traveling with it.

Recently I transitioned from the uMB 2.4/4/7k320 to a MBA 2.13/2/128SSD and I could not be happier. For everyday activities the MBA is MUCH faster and I have the joy of the MBA experience again.

I changed online backup packages to one that was gentle on the cpu (Mozy), optimized my virtual machines (and can only run one at a time now) but overall I am extremely pleased with my transition from the uMB to the MBA. My only regret is not doing it sooner.

That said, if you do a lot of VM work or a lot of heavy graphics and multimedia file editing the MBA may not be a good choice but for everyday use the MBA is great.

 

[shadowbird423]

Rev C has the nVidia 9400m, which is a much better graphics card (you'll see the difference in youtube playback.) I've also heard that using an MBA with a HDD is an absolute chore, so I would stay away from that. SSD's are great and really make this machine closer to a normal Mac in performance when doing pedestrian tasks.

 

[nobby090]

Hi

I had a 2.4 ghz Macbook that I bought in March this year. I gave it to my son for his 18th last month and bought a second hand Macbook Air 2.13 128SSD last week second hand. I must say i am very impressed with it so far. Quicker start up and seems just as fast at the things I do - itunes, email and browsing etc.

Plus its so light to carry round all the time.

I highly recommend it

 

[akbc]

thank you for the help

is the a lot of difference between:

a. Rev B SSD model and Rev C SSD model?
b. Rev C HDD model and Rev C SSD model?

Yes, the HDD in MBA's aren't as great as normal laptop-grade HDD.

So, Rev B SSD vs. Rev C SSD, you won't notice much difference, really. Some benchmarks in the early days even showed Rev B being faster...
(Please correct me if I'm wrong and that was proven to be false, kind of a faded memory)

But HDD vs. SSD, is a pretty big difference.

I'm a guy who switched from uMBP15 to a MBA Rev. B with SSD then to the uMBP13 with SSD... And I think MBA did most of the stuff that I wanted it to do.
But I do a lot of VM stuff so I just needed more RAM and I actually use the optical drive quite often, so the uMBP13 worked for me.

It's really up to you. MBA is a great machine and I think it's the best ultraportable laptop out there without a single direct comparison.

 

[AndersOlson]

For Sure

I had a 2.53 UMP 13" and a Rev B Macbook Air 1.6 with runcore SSD upgrade and decided I needed to consolidate. I got rid of the UMP and haven't had any regrets. I'd recommend getting the runcore SSD upgrade if I were you.