The new 13" MacBook Pro - i5 or i7?

I know I'm answering this pretty late, but I would imagine it is related to the last sale date for windows xp was June 30, 2008, and for apple to invest any effort into making new hardware work with software that had not been for sale for over 2.5 years and was 10 years old was a waste of engineering effort...

I am not new to macs, but am new to the idea of replacing a hard drive. I received my i5 yesterday. My iPad 3 is laughing it's face off at the Hitachi 500 GB 5200 rpm ------ no comparison..... solid state drives will always kick ***, but I need the hard drive storage and am content in every way, EXCEPT for the hard drive speed. So, I ran my google search and landed squarely on the question of i5 or i7 and your response jumped off the page at me. Where does a non-tech person begin to do the same that you did - particularly when i am under Applecare, and this will likely be invalidated...... more info, please. Thank you!

Hi KH,

Some pointers for you...

Wake from Sleep vs Bootup

Many people shut their laptops down, while only leaving their iPads in sleep mode. So this will give some users the illusion of "instant on" with the iPad, while one must wait 30 seconds for the laptop to boot. My recommendation is to ONLY use sleep mode with the laptop, and only reboot/ boot up when absolutely necessary. Always shutting down won't do anything to prolong laptop battery life.

Point and Click vs Tap

The iPad, Touch or IPhone will always be quicker to access apps, because they're only a quick touch away. Having to drag a mouse and click on an app takes additional time. Take an app like Google Maps on my iPhone. I just tap it, and within seconds I'm surfing for where I need to go. However, if I program Safari to make Google Maps my home, it also launches within seconds when clicked. If there's things you want very fast access to, like an i device, consider configuring your browser (Chrome or Safari recommeded) so that you have the top 6 or 8 visited sites always listed for when you start the program.

Upgrading the i5 Laptop

Apple may have had several complaints about the old Seagate drive in the i5, and chose to replace it with a faster Hitachi 500GB 5200 drive when they stepped the machine up from a 2.3 to a 2.4 ghz. I assure you, the newer Hitachi the machine comes with now is MUCH faster, and accounts for most of the speed increase over the previous 2.3 machine.

I run a Hitachi 500GB 7200 drive, and it feels much faster than the 5200. Even though I have 8 GB of ram now in my laptop, the HD is still what helped boost my Geekbench scoring. If you look on BH Photo (google for it, I can't post the link here) you can find it there for cheap. While you most certainly can go with a solid state drive instead, expect to pay, pay, pay through the nose for anything of that kind of size.

Apple's warranty allows you to upgrade your own ram and hard drive, with no penalty at all.

Maximum laptop performance AND space

Some users have taken to putting an SSD drive in place of the slower hard drive, and then moving the slower hard drive to where the DVD ROM drive is. That allows you to have a fast boot-up and launch of any app, while still having lots of storage space. Companies (Google it) offer this tray, which just sits in place of the DVD ROM drive. The tray is around $100 I think. They also give you an external case that can then hold the DVD ROM drive, and it then plugs in via USB when you need it.

I personally really like this idea, and it's harmless, but Apple doesn't really address the DVD ROM drive in the warranty as a user servicable item. IF you ever needed to take it back in under warranty, you'd need to put the DVD ROM drive back in where it came from.