Windows power user debating on a MBA 13, could use suggestions.

I'm a Windows Sys admin for the company I work for and have been pretty isolated to Windows for the most part. Late last year my fiancée bought a MBPr 15 and I've been playing around with it more often. I have a 2 year old HP Dv7t quad edition which is a 17 inch laptop. This was my desktop replacement and now that I have a desktop now it's just too big and heavy to use for something portable. So I'm making it into a media PC since it had an hdmi out and am now looking for an ultraportable.

I bought a lenovo yoga 2 13 last week and the battery would intermittently get detected by windows and it would hard shut down. So it's on it's way back to lenovo. For the first time ever I'm considering a Mac.
I can't find any decent ultra thin windows laptops for around the price of a MBA 13 that I really like or have good reviews.
Im looking at a 13 inch MBA i5/4gb/128gb, but I don't know if I really need 8gb of ram. I just want this for company webmail using web based outlook, yahoo/gmail, watch movies, YouTube, maybe play flash games and other minor things. No photoshop etc.
I looked at my fiancées MacBook Pro and at startup it's eating almost 4gb of ram with nothing open so I'm leaning towards 8gb of ram to be safe but would like opinions.

Other than that do you guys like your airs? I've heard they have wifi issues but most AC NICs have been having issues. If wireless n is stable I'm good.

Anything worth noting when going from windows to Mac from a power users standpoint? Any good tips or tricks links or websites you can suggest?

Thanks guys!

 

Eh, personally I suggest to people to not bother switching OSes unless they have a compelling practical reason to. Just my two cents.

Anyway, AC isn't going to be useful unless you have access to an AC wireless router; right now N is pretty much everywhere, and most ISP connections are slower than N anyway.

*I personally don't own a MBA, but I spend quite a bit of time with my peers' MBAs (and MBP/rMBPs) being on a college campus.

 

I don't care about ac, but almost all of the wifi cards that support them have issues, especially the intel 7260.

As for switching os, I almost am just curious at this point and just want to see what the other side of the fence is like.

 

Well, if you ever played with Linux/BSD before, it's basically the same thing but with a "pretty" UI slapped on top (which is pretty accurate, since OSX *is* BSD with a pretty UI).

Personally, I like the *nix world better than the NT world, though I'd rather install a free Linux OS on my computer than to buy something OSX. But that's just my two cents.

 

4GB of RAM is fine if for doing the tasks that you want. OS X scales the amount of RAM that it uses based on how much is installed and what is running. My 2012 15" MacBook Pro came with 4GB of RAM installed and, right after booting, it would only have ~1GB of RAM left yet everything still opened and ran fine. The amount of free RAM would increase or decrease depending on what I was doing, that was the same with my early 2012 13" MacBook Air. I now have 16GB of RAM in my 15" MacBook Pro and the amount of free RAM usually hovers at about 8GB. That doesn't mean that OS X is now using 8GB of RAM instead of 3GB, it's just the way it works.

I loved my 13" MacBook Air and wish I could have kept it. My main problem was the 128GB SSD and the lack of USB 3.0. I upgraded the SSD to 240GB but I quickly filled that up and I really wanted USB 3.0 as all of my external hard drives and thumb drives work with that. The use of USB 2.0 didn't hinder audio playback (my iTunes library is on an external hard drive) but it did cause some issues when playing back 1080p HD movies, mainly they would pause about once every 20-30 minutes so that the hard drive could spin and buffer them up. This doesn't occur on my 2012 MacBook Pro which has USB 3.0.

As of now, I'm contemplating getting an Air and either using my Pro as a primary desktop or selling it. The extreme portability of the Air is what I really liked and the newer ones can literally go all day without needing to be plugged in. I'm constantly moving around (walking around with my system, walking to and from a college campus, sitting outside on my outdoor deck, etc.) and my MacBook Pro gets a bit heavy. It's not bad, especially compared to other Wintel systems with similar specs and size, but it's not as portable as the MacBook Air. I could close the screen and easily carry it wherever I want but it's a bit more effort for my Pro.

If you can, I suggest going down to an Apple Store and getting your hands on one. Pick it up, hold it, play around, mess with the OS. That will give you a good feel for things in general. Switching from Windows to OS X wasn't an issue for me. Many of the control commands in Windows (control-C, control-X, control-V, etc.) are mapped using the command key in OS X. So copying is command-C, pasting is command-V. I think the biggest issue people have with OS X is window sizing for programs. Clicking the green + icon in a program bar does not make the window "full screen" like it with the square icon in Windows. Also, the red circle icon in OS X doesn't always fully close a program, often times it leaves it running in the background. You have to actually quit the program if you want it to close (command-Q). It took me a couple of days but I got used to it. I normally just leave the programs running as they don't consume that many resources. I do miss Windows 7's window snapping feature but you can download a 3rd party plug-in to fix that.

The trackpad and its gestures are above and beyond any Wintel unit I have ever used and many of them are carried over from iOS (which means they are also found in Android and Windows Phone). In the end though, both OS X and Windows are a means at accomplishing work. I think they are both well suited for their tasks. I just hate, absolutely hate, Metro (Windows 8) when using a traditional keyboard and mouse. I can't stand it so I will stay in the OS X world for quite a bit of time until MS fixes things (though I do use my Dell Venue 8 Pro for quite a bit of work).

 

I liked the Air a lot when I reviewed a few years back, but if it were my money, I'd spend the extra for the 13" Retina for the better screen.

 

I like the retina but love the form factor of the air, and honestly I don't think that many pixels is necessary on a 13inch device, 1080p would be nice though, but 1440x900 is more than likely plenty.

The 128gb ssd is small, but I do t really want to spend the extra money if I'm not really storing much on it. I think I may dump the ram into it though.
What form factor are the ssds? Considering they're pcie are they ngff?

As far as productivity goes, the gestures on osx are frankly amazing. I can't imagine how much better windows laptops would be if they had those navigation gestures.

I'll have to play around with it more, but the 14 day no questions asked return policy is nice

 

Proprietary Apple design so no upgrading unless you order from the factory or happen to find a 2nd-hand used one on fleBay.

 

I completely forgot I even asked this here. That really sucks, the only thing I can think of is that theyre using a NGFF standard for an PCIe x4 card, whereas most other NGFF ssds are x2 (iirc). I 'm guessing.

if you had to pick, just for general use (email, youtube, browsing, flash games, etc, which would you opt for, 8gb of ram or a 256gb ssd, (I dont see the upgrade to the i7 being too useful). I dont have much experience with OSX so I dont know how big of a problem 4gb of RAM is. I know that 4gb on Win 7 is plenty, but that doesnt help me here. As for ssds, from a longevity and performance standpoint the 256 will easily outlast and be faster than the 128 but Is it really necessary? dont know what the right choice is.

 

With the speed of the SSDs in the MBA and rMBPs, 4GB of RAM is sufficient for most user's needs. The main reason is because accessing the swap file (aka virtual memory) is no longer noticeably bottle necked by the speed of the HDD.

In terms of storage, depending on your current usage, 128GB might be more than sufficient. Do note that OS X will require approx 10GB to system files etc, and significantly more if you plan on dual booting Windows or keeping a VM of Windows handy.

I personally think that at the moment in time, it is worth getting the largest HD you can afford in a Mac, rather than buying more RAM. Of course, given the excellent resale value of Macs, it might be worth getting the cheapest option that currently meets your requirements, and then upgrade to a newer model when required.

 

Ill have to check out the apple stores air and see how much ram its using, wouldnt 8gb of ram remove the need for a swap file then? I have no desire to dual boot, I just cant decide whats better to do.

As far as over provisioning an ssd goes, can OSX can shrink partitions.

 

8GB should be plenty for Average Joe use cases, which would mean that the swap file shouldn't be used often, if at all.

That said, while SSDs do speed up the performance of the swap file, you *really* don't want to be using a swap file while on a SSD. Using swap often on a SSD will kill it pretty quickly if you let all those writes build up.