Deciding on an MBA

miralize

I'm looking to buy a new MBA for college. Problem is that I cant decide between the 11" high spec and 13" base model. The 13" is €100~ more, and is not that big of a deal, but I do get an SD Card slot, bigger screen, marginally better battery life, and a faster cpu (0.1Ghz+ YAY!).

The reason I'm getting this MBA is because last year hauling my 15" MBA to and from college was bit of a pain. I'm not planning on selling the MBP, but to use it at home, and for more cpu intensive activities. This is why I was at first more inclined to get the 11".

But screen real estate is important, as I will be using Photoshop & coding regularly. The added size of the 13" means that it will be less of a problem than the 11", but I do like the 11" size & weight. Then theres the odd aspect ratio of the 11" which I dont like now, but I'm guessing I could learn to deal with that.

Any thoughts as to which one best suits my needs?

fasty

I had a go of the 11" and 13" on Saturday and they are both truely lovely.

If you're going to keep the 15", you might get away with the 11" MBA, but the resolution really is pretty low on it for apps that don't support Lion's new fullscreen mode. I won't want to do anything too heavy weight on it.

That said, if you code in XCode, that does support fullscreen so you could manage it in a push!

I don't use Photoshop, I'm a Pixelmator fan but at a basic level, they're similar and on an 11" screen, it would be unusable.

padraig_f

I had a look at both of them in PC World recently and, if it was me, I'd defintely go for the 13". The 11" one looked a bit too small for useful work. I also think with wide-screen, a lot of screen real-estate is wasted. Mostly on PCs you're reading/writing documents...web-browsing, email, text-editing etc. But the optimum layout for reading/writing is portrait-mode (which most books, magazines, notepads are in).

With the 11", you have both smaller resolution and a wider screen-ratio (16:9, versus 16:10 on the 13"). Wide-screen is good for watching films on but less-than-ideal for documents, which I imagine you'd be using it mostly for. So for me, it would be a fairly easy decision to go for the bigger 16:10 screen. Portability wise there didn't seem to be a lot of difference.

Picture comparison here:
http://www.apple.com/macbookair/specs.html

miralize

Thanks for the advice. I had a look at both of them in Compub today, and while I love the 11"'s size, the screen size is much too small for my liking. Great for watching movies, but not much else I think.

Now, all thats left is trying to convince myself that the 13" wont be my primary computer :P

nesf

I got a 13" for my wife for use as a primary computer and it's worked perfectly for her. The size is perfectly workable (though I prefer a 15" screen personally) and the weight and speed due to the SSD drive makes it a very nice laptop to use.