Does anyone know which is best? MacBook Air or Pro?

Hi, emilygjones. Maybe i can shed a little light on this. Which Macbook ? Air or Pro ? well, that depends on your needs and your budget, really. The air is designed to be as light as possible. As for storage, for the MacBook Air, either 256 GB or 512 GB. for memory, 8 gigs, with 16 gigs available at the time of purchase, eg you have to order it with 16 gigs as it's not installable afterwards. Please note that none of the recent Mac notebooks have an Ethernet port built in. If you want that, you're going to have to buy an adapter. Same goes with DVD's and CD's. If you want that, you're going to have to buy an external dvd drive. The Macbook air costs either $899 or 1199, while the MacBook Pro 13" starts at 1199. You may also want to take advantage of the Education discount that Apple offers. The "top Line" MacBook Pro 13" is 1899 and offers 1 tb of storage. Apple does offer a 16" MacBook Pro, but that starts at 2599.

Being a college student, I'd imagine that you'll be on a tight budget . 2599 might be out of your price range. Apple does offer Refurbished MacBooks from time to time...here's a link to what Apple currently offers in the refurbished department. All refurbished Apple products have the same guarantee and warranty as new products, so who knows ? you might be able to save a few dollars. here's a link to the Refurbished Section of the the Apple Education store.......

https://www.apple.com/us-hed/shop/refurbished

it appears that the MacBook Air is not available in that department, which is understandable, as it was released recently, and that one will pay a hefty premium for 1 tb of storage. if you can live with 512 GB, your options are greater.

good luck with that degree

John b

emilygjones:

"Does anyone know which is best? MacBook Air or Pro?: I am starting a psychology degree in September 2020. I am planning on buying a Macbook and I am choosing between the Macbook air and pro. As well as the storage of the device. Does anyone know which Macbook is best for this and the storage"

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Consider the Following:

Contact your College, and see what they have to say. Most certainly your Academic Administrator would know best (if they are a Mac user).

About the storage - you can always buy additional external storage (mechanical hard drives, SSD drives, large flash memory sticks) and archive less-needed files onto it, but you can't upgrade the memory after purchase.

It helps to not fill it up with movie and music files. Those can go on external storage devices.

Do you have any notion of what kind of "handout" materials and/or digital text books you'll be getting? If they are proper (and searchable) text-based documents, they should not take up too much storage, but if the profs are lazy and simply make PDFs with optical scans of text, they could suck up a lot of storage in a short time.

You should get at least one external drive anyway, and dedicate it as a daily Time Machine backup.

Allow me to quote myself from another (similar) thread:

"Oh - it might be useful to check out the requirements for using Zoom (especially with virtual backgrounds) as a kind of benchmark. - See https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/360043484511#h_1d44b8c6-0031-4c8a-9300-8c1a722ba057

You might be doing a lot of that for a while.

I think using a physical green screen is less challenging for either MacBook model, but it gets much better results."

I have a new MacBook Pro and my wife recently got an even-newer MacBook Air. (I do not recall the exact specs.) Mine can do the Virtual Backgrounds without a physical green screen, but we learned that hers cannot. It has to do a lot of crunching to detect what is part of you and what is real-life background. It's not a big deal because even when possible, the edge detection (without a physical green screen) really sucks anyway. Misshapen heads with outlines that wobble like Jell-O, spontaneous amputations of waving hands, etc. A real green screen hanging behind you is much more convincing.

BTW - you can get a 100-foot roll of bright green 40" wide vinyl banquet table covering at a dollar store, for CAD$15, in my case. Enough for 5 generously large backdrops even if you use a double layer to even out the colour.

Some more thoughts:

Get a wired keyboard and mouse or external trackpad to save wear and tear on the built-in devices. I imagine you may be doing a lot of the typing in your residence, so you can just leave them there. (Next to the Time Machine backup drive, of course.)

Most of the failures of laptops (that I have seen) are the mechanical parts - keyboards and pointing devices. Sometimes it might just be the space bar or the "E" key, but it's still really annoying.

Any brand will do, and will provide an immediate backup.