aarogb Posted January 10, 2011 Posted January 10, 2011 I am seriously considering getting a MacBook Air for school, fishing pics etc. I will probably use a USB flash drive for most of my school stuff and I will not be using the Macbook Air for playing games, but I will have my iTunes on it and I have a lot of songs. I saw that both versions, the 64GB and the 128GB have 2GB of memory. So what is the difference between "memory" and "flash storage"? Also, which one would you recommend for me? I know there are a lot of you guys that are WAY smarter than me in this kind of stuff so thats why I asked you. Thanks for any input you are able to give! Quote
Nibbles Posted January 10, 2011 Posted January 10, 2011 If I may ask, why a macbook air? Also, how big will the laptop be? From personal experience laptops are not as useful for school as I thought they would be - especially if they were over 15.4" in size. A 17" laptop will be awkward to handle in classrooms, especially if your classrooms are equipped with those tiny half-desks like mine are. IMO, what they're trying to say is that the machine has 2 gigabytes of RAM, which some people refer to as memory. The 64gb/128gb memory refers to how much the hard drive can store. "Flash storage" means that its hard drive is not a conventional hard drive, but rather a Solid-State Drive or SSD. SSD's have the advantage of much faster data transfers than conventional hard drives, so you're less likely to have your hard drive data transfer rate bottle-necking and slowing down your computer. They're also much lighter. However, in the case of a macbook air, I doubt the machine will have enough processing power to cause even a conventional 5400 RPM hard drive to bottleneck, so I'm not sure how much benefit you will truly derive from having a solid state drive other than it making your laptop lighter. Quote
GTrombly Posted January 10, 2011 Posted January 10, 2011 I would save the money for the air and by a macbook pro, It has more software for pictures and video making. RAM is memory, it is random access memory, it allows you to run different programs and access things faster. If you have the money max the ram. I have a macbook and an Imac both have 2 gbs of ram. The only time they kind of hesitate is when I have itunes, iphoto, and a whole bunch of different thing going. I can run windows 7 with VM Fusion no problem on my macbook but I plan on upgrading to 4gbs ram. Feel free to send a pm if you have questions. Quote
GTrombly Posted January 11, 2011 Posted January 11, 2011 They're also much lighter. However, in the case of a macbook air, I doubt the machine will have enough processing power to cause even a conventional 5400 RPM hard drive to bottleneck, http://www.apple.com/macbookair/performance.html It has plenty of processing power. Macs work much differently than pcs the way they run and switch programs. Quote
aarogb Posted January 11, 2011 Author Posted January 11, 2011 Thanks guys I will probably look into the regular MacBook Pro since you said that it has more software to runs different things. And GTrombly you will probably be getting a PM from me if you don't mind as I find more stuff about the MacBook Pro Thanks again. Quote
Super User burleytog Posted January 11, 2011 Super User Posted January 11, 2011 SSD's are still too new to be worth the premium. Quote
Nibbles Posted January 11, 2011 Posted January 11, 2011 They're also much lighter. However, in the case of a macbook air, I doubt the machine will have enough processing power to cause even a conventional 5400 RPM hard drive to bottleneck, http://www.apple.com/macbookair/performance.html It has plenty of processing power. Macs work much differently than pcs the way they run and switch programs. Macs are different from "PC"s in that the Mac OS runs on UNIX kernel and shell whereas Microsoft Windows runs on its own proprietary kernel. While Macs may appear to be faster at some tasks due to better hardware compatibility with software (due to lack of driver issues that plague Windows at times), it does not mean that they are inherently powerful by any means, simply more efficient at times. The Macbook Air 13" has a 2.13 GHz Core2 Duo, which is pretty old hardware. The 11" runs a meager 1.6 GHz Core2 Duo. I highly doubt that kind of raw processing power is going to bottleneck a standard 5400 rpm hard drive. Unless you're transferring several different files into different directories at one time while trying to access large media files at the same time, the FSB on the processor is likely to hit its limit first. Quote
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