2012 MacBook Pro vs. the 2015 MacBook Air

Hi milehigh3r

In this article MBP= MacBook Pro and MBA=MacBook Air The specific MBP i am comparing the MBA with is the Late 2012 15"

Both of these laptops have there pros and cons. I am assuming you are looking at the 15" MBP and 13" MBA

The i7 in the MBP would also run higher as you say its Turbo Clock is 3.1GHz meaning this is the fastest frequency it will goto.

Pros of the MBP (MacBook Pro)

Retina Display (A Macbook air does not feature a Retina Display)

Can use unto 16GB Ram

There is also more ports on the MBP

All MBP CPU's are i7's meaning you would get the benefit of hyper threading which creates an additional 4 virtual cores. which will make it a 8 Core CPU.

the MBA would not have this feature unless you upgrade the extra $130 to the i7 (Note: This i7 in the MBA is only a Dual Core)

The MBA Pros / Cons

Newer Generation Ports (Thunderbolt 2 (Thunderbolt 1 is on the MBP))

You can not install any operating system prior to OS X 10.11 El Capitan

To Conclude i would totally recommend that you go for the MBP since you are getting the extra two cores and i7 as standard, you also get a much better display. Also all Apple Refurbished products come with new batteries (I would suggest you go for a Class A which means best condition). Try to get an SSD if possible as they will make it lot faster in start up of the OS and Apps.

Need anything explaining better or have any questions feel free to reply to me.

It appears that you are looking at the 2012 MacBook Pro and not the MacBook Pro retina model. If that is the case I suggest that you drop it from consideration. Apple’s only reason for selling this model is to provide a notebook with a built-in optical drive which some customers still demand. It has received no real upgrades since 2012 and its slow traditional hard drive is a bottleneck. When it was originally introduced it was a solid performer but compared to the MBA and MBP retina, today it is a has-been.

It is very hard to compare PC and Mac performance even though they now share the same CPUs. The fact that the Mac OS and hardware are developed in tandem provides a performance and workflow boost that can only be experienced, not scientifically measured. A second factor that can make a PC look faster than a Mac using benchmark tests is that Macs don’t have top flight GPUs while many PC owners install ridiculously overpowered GPUs for the bragging rights and benchmarking tests are written to show off the GPU differences even though they make no contribution to real life work in word processing and surfing the internet.

I’ll put it this way. I have a DYI reasonably fast PC with Win10, a 2 1/2 year old top end iMac, a 1 year old MBP retina, and a 2011 MBA. (I work in IT.) The MBA is my goto machine for portability and there’s nothing I do on it that ever makes me wish I were sitting down at one of the other computers (except for sometimes wishing I had a larger display). Even though every other computer I own benchmarks faster, this “slowest” computer doesn’t feel slow. Yes, if I’m applying a Photoshop filter to a batch of files the other computers are faster — by a couple seconds. Yes, if I’m compiling a largish program the other computers would finish a little bit faster. But for 90% of the work I do on my computer I’m the slowest member of the team.

This is a long winded way of saying that you should ignore the specs for a bit and think about what you want out of the computer. If portability is your goal the MBA or MBP retina are your go to choices. From there think about weight, battery life, screen quality, RAM requirements (go for the most you can afford because they aren’t upgradeable), and SSD size. CPU speed is the last thing to think about.