Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, David, mac_h8r1, Nelliesboo
JdL wrote:I just bought the new 2013 Macbook Air, and I have to say it's awesome. 12 hrs+ battery life, small / light / fast. Has Intel HD 5000 GPU which can handle a lot of graphics, even better than MacBook Pro or Retina. Also the SSD is the fastest you can get anywhere.
JdL wrote:Also the SSD is the fastest you can get anywhere.
chµck wrote:The UX31A has comparably battery life (on paper)
chµck wrote:And it's also not a mac.
chµck wrote:I don't know anyone who can feel a difference between SSDs in everyday usage.
End User wrote:
I don't know anyone who can feel a difference between SSDs in everyday usage.
chµck wrote:Well, I said:I don't know anyone who can feel a difference between SSDs in everyday usage.
And then you go on to post some synthetic benchmarks XD
What does this mean in the real world? The new SSD is definitely snappier in system use. Wake from sleep is a bit quicker, as are application launches.
stoydgen wrote:The 3 notebooks I narrowed down to when I recently purchased were:
-Sony Vaio Pro 13
-ASUS Zenbook UX31A
-2013 MBA 13"
The Vaio Pro 13 looked the sexiest in my opinion, and had the battery life to compete with the MBA on paper, but faltered in the price stakes. The UX31A loses out on real world battery life. The MBA loses out on the Screen resolution and that it's an (admittedly very good) TN Panel.
As the others have said though, the real world battery life on the MBA is insane. I regularly can get 10+ hours of battery life while running a windows VM alongside OSX. I also grabbed a pretty good price on it due to the various student discounts and tax exemptions for purchasing while overseas, so it ended up (ironically) being the most cost effective.
chµck wrote:stoydgen wrote:The 3 notebooks I narrowed down to when I recently purchased were:
-Sony Vaio Pro 13
-ASUS Zenbook UX31A
-2013 MBA 13"
The Vaio Pro 13 looked the sexiest in my opinion, and had the battery life to compete with the MBA on paper, but faltered in the price stakes. The UX31A loses out on real world battery life. The MBA loses out on the Screen resolution and that it's an (admittedly very good) TN Panel.
As the others have said though, the real world battery life on the MBA is insane. I regularly can get 10+ hours of battery life while running a windows VM alongside OSX. I also grabbed a pretty good price on it due to the various student discounts and tax exemptions for purchasing while overseas, so it ended up (ironically) being the most cost effective.
Never, never, ever get a Vaio.
Yes I'm biased.
You would be too if you had to fix them to pay your way through college.
JdL wrote:Has Intel HD 5000 GPU which can handle a lot of graphics, even better than MacBook Pro or Retina
JdL wrote:Also the SSD is the fastest you can get anywhere.
keltor wrote:I work for Sony (well a small part of Sony Music) and I'll say this - don't buy any cheap Japanese "made" laptops. The cheap ones are terrible, the good ones are of course overpriced.
keltor wrote:You can install Windows on the MBA directly, so no need to worry about any Apple ecosystem issues. There's a lot of other reasons NOT to go down that route, but that one unfortunately isn't it.
For some people the lack of ability to get a 4 years no real questions asked warranty is an issue. Dell/Lenovo/HP all offer fairly lengthy warranties if you want to pony up for them (and usually it's best to do so up front not later on.)
keltor wrote:MBA guy - ummm the HD5000 is designed to be just equal to the machines with NVIDIA GT 650M. That's actually the design target, but in reality it's really not there just quite. Also gets a lower screen res to deal with.
slowriot wrote:Has the situation improved with regard to running Windows natively on Macs? I sold off my MBP a bit over 3 years ago because I can't stand OSX's interface (It's awful IMO) and attempting to install Windows 7 resulted in drastically reduced battery life and the touchpad didn't work well in Windows either.
NovusBogus wrote:Macbooks are a good choice if everything you need is Mac compatible
NovusBogus wrote:but that usually isn't the case
mghong wrote:My requirement are simple
-Edit Photo ,Surf net , facebook , MS Office ppt ,excel, word , online movie , some simple games
the laptop should have USB 3 for external harddisk/card reader . and it output should have either HDMI /(projector interfaces).
Chrispy_ wrote:JdL wrote:Also the SSD is the fastest you can get anywhere.
It's fast for a consumer SSD, but PCI Express SSD's have been around for a loong time, and it's by no means the fastest.