I currently have a late 2011 MacBook Pro that needs replacing —— unsure of if I can go with the air or need the pro.
I teach online so I spend a lot of time on the internet with multiple windows open. I also use Word & Excel a lot, and programs like Prezi.
i do not do any gaming or video edits or downloading music, etc. My main desire is to have fast internet speed & long battery life.
air or pro??
The 13-inch MacBook Air has a slightly longer battery life than the 13-inch MacBook Pro, but the two machines are very similar. If you don't need the extra speed of the MacBook Pro, I would recommend saving $200 and buying the MacBook Air, or upgrading the storage in the MacBook Air. You can get MacBook Air with 256 GB storage or MacBook Pro with 128 GB storage for $1299 USD.
air will give you more battery life and mbp will give you more power.
outside of that I have a new $3500 mac my company gave me and my kid has a 4 year old windows gaming laptop that will blow the doors off it and it was $1200 at the time
if you need to research on the web, write that novel that all teachers claim is in the works and toil on spreadsheets the air the MBAir will be fine
the better of the two has a 250GB SSD for $200 more, it can also be upgraded to 16GB RAM for $200
if you had to make a choice do the RAM, you can always get an external drive with more storage than you will ever use.
I do think the power limit of the MBA vs the MBP will not be a factor in what you do.
Unless you need to do heavy 3D composition, audio or video the MBP would be fancy but not necessary.
Storage can be defined as your desk and all the drawers and papers
memory is the desktop
The more you need to take out of the drawer the bigger the desktop is going to need to be able to fit.
when you are not using these programs they can stay in storage and not need to be brought to that 'desktop'. the moment you open them they begin to use more RAM
What has happened is that as software becomes more sophisticated it requires more Memory to run, when the computer reaches that limit it looks to the hard drive for memory which will slow the computer down noticeably.
Memory (RAM) is going to be faster than storage on a sold state drive (SSD) - which is still a hard drive, just upgraded technology which is a lot faster.
You cannot change the size of the internal solid state drive (SSD) storage on most if not all new macs but you can buy external storage:
You can buy 200GB of cloud storage from Apple for $3 a month, you could get a network storage device for your home, an external hard drive or a combination of any of these
but while you also cannot change the amount of Memory (RAM) in the laptop, and there is no other solution to that like their is with the hard drive or SSD storage
When it gets into storage & such is when i start to get confused! This is the computer that I currently have and storage/memory has never been an issue.
With this info would you still think Air will be fine?
Thanks that is helpful! Sounds like the air would function well for what I use my computer for then .... think it can handle having 5-6 tabs open on my browser at once??
This MacBook was given to me gently used and now that I look at the info more closely it shows that I have 395GB available of 500GB.
so getting the 128gb should be plenty, yea?
Air or Pro better for a teacher?
