hardware / software question

abirozyabirozy
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014


Hello


 


I am considering purchasing the new macbook air 13". I currently have the original aluminum unibody macbook 2.4 ghz.  The battery is dying and will only last 30 min and it is starting to get buggy.


 


QUESTION:


 


1)  Should I get the air right now or wait till the new OS comes out in fall?


 


2)  Is there any advantage to purchasing a machine that comes with the new OS vs installing on a machine that has a different os (Mountain Lion) and already has other apps?  Will it be more "buggy" if it is done that way?


 


3)  Is it safe to assume that the new Macbook Airs will be faster than the previous ones?  


 


4)  I am not a power user (word processing, internet surfing, email, etc..)  Is it worth it to get the I7 and or the extra RAM?


 


Thank you.  Any help would be appreciated.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 2
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,322moderator
    abirozy wrote: »
    1)  Should I get the air right now or wait till the new OS comes out in fall?

    2)  Is there any advantage to purchasing a machine that comes with the new OS vs installing on a machine that has a different os (Mountain Lion) and already has other apps?  Will it be more "buggy" if it is done that way?

    I'd get new hardware as soon as it comes out. There's no advantage between having a new install vs an upgrade.
    abirozy wrote: »
    3)  Is it safe to assume that the new Macbook Airs will be faster than the previous ones?

    They are faster than the previous MBAs but not significantly. They've improved battery life quite a lot. Compared to the unibody MB, they should be around double the performance.
    abirozy wrote: »
    4)  I am not a power user (word processing, internet surfing, email, etc..)  Is it worth it to get the I7 and or the extra RAM?

    There are some tests of the new ones here:

    http://www.anandtech.com/show/7058/2013-macbook-air-pcie-ssd-and-haswell-ult-inside

    Your model scores 1.3 in Cinebench multi-threaded.

    The new PCI storage gets over 700MB/s, which is really fast - if you still have a hard drive in yours, the storage will be over 10x the speed. Going by clock speed alone, the i7 should be at least 30% faster than the i5, which is pretty good for $150 but it's not going to make much difference to basic usage, just things like video encoding. Apps are getting more RAM heavy so the 8GB for $100 would be a good investment as it helps prevent wasting space on the small SSD with virtual memory caches and helps resale value as it can't be upgraded later. You also get more video memory that way too.
  • Reply 2 of 2
    maartinn456maartinn456 Posts: 1member


    Hi Friends, Graphics cards are impressive pieces of hardware. Some types of games demand more of a graphics card. If you're running on a PC with a Celeron or Athlon II CPU, you can get some extra graphics oomph by upgrading to a better graphics card, but the improvement will be limited. Let's take a look at what one of the latest card, please click: - [url=http://www.ezdia.com/epad/ati-radeon-hd-5670-series-graphics-card-amd/6972/] ATI RADEON HD 5670 – SERIES GRAPHICS CARDS FROM AMD [/url]

Sign In or Register to comment.