New MacBook Air

D

Dr Who

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Dear All

I am busy looking at new laptops for our staff members, historically we found that the premium paid for Apple MacBooks was offset by the much longer useful lives. Most of our Windows Laptops are upgraded within 3 years while our older generation macs last well over 4 years.

However I am concerned about this new breed of Macbook airs. Below are my concerns:
1) The SSD hard drive is now tiny compared to previous generations, while it is much faster will the size of storage be its downfall in year 2 or 3
2) The new Haswel chip is great but will the fact that its a 1.3 be a downfall much the same way iphones are becoming relic's as Apple adds additional overheads to their iOX and it ages.

As these devices are not upgrade-able do you think the airs will last more than 3 years ? If we look at the MacBook pro the costs skyrocket due to the retina display which is all great but costs a fortune

regards
 
Watching this one with interest... You raise valid points regarding storage - and it being future-proof. That being said, guess it will be determined largely by what your staff do?

I have plenty of apps - and use most of them regularly. Having moved my iTunes/iPhoto/iMovie and related "media" off on to an external, I was quite surprised at how much was left on a (admittedly) 240gb SSD... If I was given a MBA with 128gb by my company, for strictly work related tasks, I could easily have managed to fit all on to that as well... But I don't do media-related work (video/photos etc.), so that obviously makes a big difference...
 
1. Storage requirements are very much different from person to person, I have the 128GB model and haven't run out of space yet. I use it for basic office work, email and some development. All my storage requirements are either taken care by my work NAS, my home NAS or cloud services like Dropbox.

2. The 2013 and 2012 MBA's are basically identical when it comes to performance yet the 2013 drops the clock speed by .5Ghz. The battery saving is most definitely worth it.

If you are not doing any intensive processing on the MBA there is no reason why it won't last 3 years.

Here is a basic comparison of CPU performance vs other CPUs:

i5 model: http://cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5-4250U+@+1.30GHz&id=1944
i7 model: http://cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-4650U+@+1.70GHz&id=1955

CPU doesn't mean everything though and these machines are super snappy due to the fast SSD. I would recommend getting a model with 8GB memory if you can find one.
 
What field of work are these staff in?

If not in the creative/multimedia field then size should not be an issue. Are you really gonna fill that SSD up with docs, spreadsheets, presentations & pdf files? I doubt it. Secondly all data on the laptops should be synced to company servers or the cloud. Keep the ssd encrypted in case of loss, theft etc.
 
Beavcoon said:
How do you do that?
Click to expand...

I basically googled. Each one worked differently - but it was pretty simple in the end. But I cannot emphasize this is enough - make backups!

I had a TM *and* a CCC cloned drive to fall back on, in case anything went wrong - which thankfully didn't.

iPhotos is potentially the trickiest, since it copies that single iPhoto library - you don't want some interruption during that process. iMovies involved simply starting a new library on the external, and then moving Events *inside/from within* iPhoto, from the original to the new library.

iTunes also involved an Export from within - with a few more tricks - but all was found on Apple support pages, with a bit of extra checks across different sources to verify all worked as it should.

I feared it was going to be very complex - in the end, it was quite straight-forward.

About a week after all was moved, and verified as working - I erased the CCC clone. Not a stutter thereafter.

Most I needed to do was to point iTunes to a few album art pics that I had added after the fact. The move broke the link. But all my ratings and playlists remained as it. Just be sure to take your library settings file (and that other one) across. You'll see it mentioned in the Support Pages.
 
Cassady said:
I basically googled. Each one worked differently - but it was pretty simple in the end. But I cannot emphasize this is enough - make backups!

I had a TM *and* a CCC cloned drive to fall back on, in case anything went wrong - which thankfully didn't.

iPhotos is potentially the trickiest, since it copies that single iPhoto library - you don't want some interruption during that process. iMovies involved simply starting a new library on the external, and then moving Events *inside/from within* iPhoto, from the original to the new library.

iTunes also involved an Export from within - with a few more tricks - but all was found on Apple support pages, with a bit of extra checks across different sources to verify all worked as it should.

I feared it was going to be very complex - in the end, it was quite straight-forward.

About a week after all was moved, and verified as working - I erased the CCC clone. Not a stutter thereafter.

Most I needed to do was to point iTunes to a few album art pics that I had added after the fact. The move broke the link. But all my ratings and playlists remained as it. Just be sure to take your library settings file (and that other one) across. You'll see it mentioned in the Support Pages.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I'll check it out.
 
Thanks for all the advise, yes we have a NAS so they should not need loads of storage.

I was just concerned with the increase in the size of everything but it looks like my fears around the processor are not valid anymore. Also I was given a tip from our local mac store, SSD usb drivers the small micro ones work well to increase the portable storage you have.

regards
 
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