Mac laptops

Mon 22 Oct 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

As noted before, I seem to be somewhat rough on my laptops: Kelly and I have twice bought new laptops (new white MacBooks sometimes in the 2000s, then used MacBook Pros in March 2011) at the same time and I have worn mine out first.*

So now I have a question for Mac laptop users (as I will be Time Machining my current laptop & software over to the new one). I am probably moving from a 15″ MBPro to a 13″ and would love to hear user’s experiences with both the 13″ MacBook Pro and the 13″ MacBook Air. (I am tempted to buy the former with a steady-state drive.)

As I mentioned, I appear to be somewhat hard on my laptops—it goes to and from home with me and most of the press’s work is done on it. At any given day I will have Mail, Firefox (which seems to be crashing the current laptop, so I may switch to Chrome), Safari, Word, InDesign, PhotoShop, Preview, QuickBooks, Cyberduck, and I don’t know what else running so I would love to hear from people who are using their laptops for such things. Can the little laptops do these things or should I just go back to the 15″ (5.6 pounds/2.56 kg) monster?

Any help appreciated!

* There is a chance that I wear my laptops out for the same inherited reason I can’t wear a wind-up watch. I was horrified as a kid when I go a watch for the first time from Santa (memory serves: it was a Sekonda!) and it stopped working within a few hours. There’s nothing like the secret horror of thinking you’ve broken your big new present before lunch. I was hugely relieved to discover that my mum can’t wear a wind-up, either. I had a few more watches as a kid, then carried a robot pocketwatch for a while and now with the ubiquity of phones I don’t bother. I might be able to wear a modern, quartz watch, but I’m happy without one now. Besides, why give my “talent” with machinery more opportunity to express itself?