Mba or mbp 13

[billy baxton]

really the only question is.

what will your wife be using her computer for. for (most) people the mba is powerfull enough to fullfill all their needs. shouldn't kid yourself into thinking you need more than 1.4 ghz and 2 gigs of ram to type notes in microsoft word, or surf the net. and as for battery life, how often will she be away from an outlet? you say portability is not that much of an issue, since she will be not taking it outside the house much. so then it shouldn't be a big deal to keep in plugged in.

when suggesting a laptop/computer to friends I often make the mistake of recommending something that would fit my needs. but then I remember most people wont be worried about photo retouching or video editing.

I've also noticed that alot of the people who complain about not being able to edit videos efficiently or retouch raw images, have never even edited a video before, or retouched a photo, and dont really plan to. but they are in that "what if sometime in the future I NEED to do those things" frame of mind. but in reality they may never need to do anything more than messing around with word docs for work.

or maybe your wife needs something for heavy graphic editing. then go MBP, otherwise. go air, or whatever the cheapest option is.

 

[gwsat]

The 13" MBP with a 2.6 GHz processor and SSD would perform better. How much of that I would notice in real world use I'm not exactly sure. But if going from 1.8GHz to 2.1GHz in the MBA is worthwhile, then going from 2.1 in the MBA to 2.6 in the MBP is too, perhaps more so. I doubt I would upgrade to 8Gb RAM, but it would be nice to know that I have that choice and it may come in to play at resale time.

Battery life is a serious factor: MBA rated at 7hrs, MBP at 10hrs. THAT is huge. Missing Gigabit Eternet could be a real problem. Just last week I visited a client and the only way I could connect to the internet was by using their Ethernet hookup.

Although my loaded 13 inch MBA has performed beyond my fondest expectations, I would certainly not try to dissuade you from getting a 13 inch MBP with an SSD. I would, however, urge you to reconsider getting the model with a 2.66Ghz processor. Such an upgrade would cost you $300.00 more that the 2.4Ghz model. It seems to me that such a modest bump would mean nothing to your user experience and would not be cost effective in any event. For what its worth that has been the conventional wisdom in the Macbook Pro Forum ever since the current lineup of MBPs was introduced.

Unless your demands on a battery are pretty extreme you won't have to worry about battery life on a 13 inch MBA. I am sitting in a Barnes & Noble now and have been using my MBA for about 20 minutes with the display's brightness at about 50 percent. The life remaining on the battery still shows 8 hours 20 minutes. It wouldn't be that good in continuous use, of course, but when the MBA is used sporadically one charge goes a long way.