Macbook Air vs Macbook Pro

If you don't carry it around for uni, just go for 15" MacBook Pro cause you can modify it to max 8GB ram and more disk space with awesome display/performance, however, if you are going to carry it around all the time, the weight of MBA definitely gonna help for mobile user. Think about carrying a 2litres milk/water bottle around all the time, try it and you will understand what I am talking about 🙂

The MacBook Pro has Firewire, the MacBook Air does not.

Hi rachfell,

Just FYI, you don't have to wait until you're enrolled in university to get the educational discount. Assuming you're a student now (secondary, high school?) you can still get the discount. Like someone else mentioned, at certain times of year there are different promos when you buy a Mac that correspond to the school year, which might be a factor for you (like right now you get $99 toward a printer, not as much fun as an iPod, but it's something), but if you want your computer now and you're a student in some regard, you don't have to wait until you start university to get the discount if you don't want to.

Good luck with your decision!

Just want to give you my 2¢ - I graduated a long time ago but have been in technology/sciences as a pro for 20 years. A couple of points....

- You can get a student discount NOW. You just need docs (or order online and swear you are a student) - Not many schools have "special" deals with Apple that are any different than the normal education discount that pretty much anyone can get.

- In general MACs are fantastic platforms for science software - they are UNIX and run many many many things not available on windows with a simple install (via mac ports). In addition to fantastic Mac only software, not only that - you can run windows seamlessly via VMware parallels, or VBox. Heck it's actually better virtual than it is on the bare metal (easy snapshots).

- As a development platform - IT ROCKS - actually it more than rocks. It is the platform of choice for most internet developers and natively runs fantastic development tools/platforms/etc. Ie. gcc, everything RUBY, git, python, perl, etc, etc, etc. Unlike crappy windows "ports" of the same software or god forbid Cygwin under windoze. - yuck. On top of that you get the excellent Xcode and the OS X/iOS dev platform FOR FREE out of the box.

-Performance Development on the Air is fantastic - no real constraints. In fact the only thing that is a little slow on the Air for most people is two things - one heavy duty batch image processing (RAW - not JPEG), HD video rendering (unbearable on most laptops even my MBP Core i5 vs my MacPro), and GIANT PHOTOSHOP doing complex image files (think 1Gig+ images again not JPEG).

-Remember that todays ULV Core2 is better than yesteryear's supercomputer/cray fast for calculating reasonable student "science" things. Even non-student things. There are some real-time modeling/visualization things that could cause it not to be so great but that may be a phd or three away. Get a new air at that point - all this stuff will be junk in three years.

Just as a note - my iPhone/iPad has some of the coolest "molecule drawing" stuff I have seen - not a big deal. Honestly 1080p video rendering/manipulation/effects/color (think finalcut studio) is just about the most taxing thing regularly done on "personal" computers. Most of your student work in any of the sciences or computer field is going to be in your head - not crunching anywhere near the data of making a feature length film. The air is perfect for a science/tech major. Seriously.


RB

hey can u help me out, i also cant decide weather the MBP or the MBA is the better choice 4 me. i'm bout to start university but i need one taht can run both mac osx and windows 7 since i'm gona study in engineering i need to use strictly windows based programs like autocad, vector works..etc. also gamming is a plus and battery life...thanks

Both Pro and MBA can run windows. I think you should ask other Engineering students how heavy-duty those programs are. While I'm gonna guess that the MBA can run them fine, I'm also going to guess, from what's been written about the MBAs, that if they're heavy-weight programs they might not be as speedy on an MBA as a pro.

Engineering sounds like a subject where you might want the more powerful computer rather than the more light-weight.