How to choose a MacBook

I wrote the text below for a friend who wanted to upgrade his ageing MacBook, but wasn’t sure which of the new models to get…

MacBook Air 11-inch. 64gb storage, 2gb of RAM. £849. This is a basic model. I don’t think you can do much with 64gb of flash storage. And 2gb of RAM isn’t enough if you plan to open a few apps at once.

MacBook Air 11-inch. 128gb storage, 4gb of RAM. £999 (£150 more). This, for me, is the minimum you’ll need to do serious work. The only issue is the flash storage at 128gb. Questions to consider…

How much space do the following take up on my current computer?

• Songs
• Photos
• Files
• Mac applications
• Apps for iPhone plus backup

What do you plan to actually DO with your notebook?

Battery life is 5 hours on the 11-inch models, compared to 7 hours n the 13-inch models. If you want to add lots of movies, hi-res photos, etc, 128gb of flash storage may not be enough. In which case, you can pay an extra £250 to upgrade to 256gb of flash storage. (You can only do this at point of purchase and not later!) This would bring the total price to £1,149.

MacBook Air 13-inch. 128gb of flash storage. 4gb of RAM. This has a faster processor than the 11-inch models: 1.7GHz vs 1.6GHz. See my notes above re whether you need more storage than this.

MacBook Air 13-inch. 256gb flash storage. 4gb of RAM. If you can afford this model, you love the lightness of the Air, you like the extra 2 inches of screen display, you want the 2 extra hours of battery life, and you plan to have a lot of music, photos and movies on the notebook then go for this model. If you plan to do a fair amount of movie rendering or other processor intensive work, consider paying another £100 to upgrade to the 1.8GHz Intel Core i7 processor.

MacBook Pro 13-inch. 2.3GHz processor, 4gb RAM, 320GB hard drive. £999. This is heavier and bulkier than an Air and the hard drive will mean that applications won’t be as fast at loading. Battery life at 7 hours is the same as the 13-inch Airs and 2 hours more than the 11-inch Airs. Pay another £300 if you want 500gb of hard drive storage and a faster processor at 2.7GHz, and it being an i7 instead of an i5.

MacBook Pro 15-inch models: £1,549 to £1,849. Bigger screens, of course, and a beefier processor: quad core instead of dual core.
Bear in mind that the MacBook Pros have built-in CD/DVD drives whereas you have to pay an extra £65 for a plug-in drive for the Airs.

MacBook Pro 17-inch: £2,099. We own two 17-inch models. One, I bought in the summer of 2011, I upgraded in the checkout on Apple’s Online Store to 512gb of SSD storage for the much faster loading and saving speed, 8gb of RAM and the faster processor. I justify this investment as this MacBook Pro is my workhorse for producing videos for YouTube, etc.

Accessories

MacBook Air SuperDrive: £66 extra if you have files or movies on CD or DVD you want to access.

Carrying case: You can get these at a much lower cost on ebay. Decide if you want a front pocket to hold the charger and any cables you may own.

To consider…

How will you get your data from your current notebook to this new notebook? Your new device will come with very clever Migration Assistant, but you’ll need to know which sockets you have on your current notebook so you can connect to this new one. For example, you could use an Ethernet cable to move the data across. In which case you’ll need this cable. (Borrow one or get one very cheap from ebay.) If you get a MacBook Air you’ll need an Ethernet Adapter which costs £25. You may find a cheaper ‘copy’ one on ebay. Bear in mind that moving the data can take a couple of hours, and you’ll want to do this as soon as you get your new notebook.

Backup storage: It’s useful to backup your entire notebook from time to time. My advice is, if you get 256gb of flash storage on your new notebook, to buy a 512gb hard drive with at least a USB2 connection or even better a FireWire 2 or Thunderbolt connection for speed. Then use the free Carbon Copy Cloner software to clone your internal drive and then do incremental backups every week or 2. This procedure isn’t so important now that iCloud has been launched, but personally I’d rather have a clone of my MacBook Pro on an external drive than rely on the cloud completely. For a start, a full recovery from a hard drive will be faster than downloading from the cloud!

Please note: if you’re unsure what screen size to get, do read this companion post I wrote about using an iPad with the Air Display app to give you more screen to work with.

If you have any questions about this quickly put-together guide, let me know!

Chris Payne helps people triumph over the challenges in their lives: one-on-one, by phone, and via video calls. He also creates websites like this one for people, and teaches them how to earn a part- or full-time income from their website. See this page for more about him.