Air or MB what do I lose or gain? (1 Viewer)

[Ronald Epstein]

Quote:

It's trivially easy to make an external drive the host for your iTunes library if that really is a concern.

Bingo!

This past week I bought a Western Digital 1TB drive to put my iTunes library on.
(My review on Amazon sits near the top of the most recent entries).

So far it is working great for the purpose I intended it for and it leaves me more
room on my SSD drive.

 

[Sam Posten]

I love the look of that black carbon fibre fascia. Neat! Didn't know the 2TB Passports were out, they will plummet in price fast and the 1.5TB ones should be under a hundy soon.

 

[TonyD]

I'm a the apple store now just to look. I already use a 500 g. Seagate for iTunes.
The current mb has an 80g hd and we barely have enough space on that even without iTunes in there.
No games.

 

[TonyD]

Seen today within feet of each other.

 

[Steve Tannehill]

Remember you can custom build an MBA with 8 gig of RAM. Might take a week to arrive, though.

 

[Sam Posten]

What's even more fun is to go past those stores on a Friday night. You will be in the middle of a crowd of hundreds at the apple store and walk down to the MS store and find 3 people in a huge hangar. That was my experience at Tysons anyway, the one in Christiana isn't open yet obviously. I actually like the temporary Apple store there too, it's a mess of humanity in a smaller space =)
If you are into them the LEGO store is close by too!
And tax free liquor at the Costco just outside can't be beat. $22 for a half gallon of the Cap'n!

 

[TonyD]

Ive always hated Lego.
Nothing like building a toy that is made to fall apart as soon as you touch it.
We were also on Costco today and the apple store now is about the size
Of the old one before they enlarged that one.
Now it looks like its going to be huge.

 

[DaveF]

Originally Posted by Ronald Epstein /t/322655/air-or-mb-what-do-i-lose-or-gain#post_3956186


Bingo!

This past week I bought a Western Digital 1TB drive to put my iTunes library on.
(My review on Amazon sits near the top of the most recent entries).

So far it is working great for the purpose I intended it for and it leaves me more
room on my SSD drive.

You don't mind not having your iTunes library when you unplug and hit the road?

 

[DaveF]

Originally Posted by Sam Posten /t/322655/air-or-mb-what-do-i-lose-or-gain#post_3956283
What's even more fun is to go past those stores on a Friday night. You will be in the middle of a crowd of hundreds at the apple store and walk down to the MS store and find 3 people in a huge hangar. That was my experience at Tysons anyway, the one in Christiana isn't open yet obviously. I actually like the temporary Apple store there too, it's a mess of humanity in a smaller space =)
If you are into them the LEGO store is close by too!
And tax free liquor at the Costco just outside can't be beat. $22 for a half gallon of the Cap'n!

Sam, you visit Tysons Corner mall?

I got to get out and meetup with people in the region.

 

[TonyD]

You don't mind not having your iTunes library when you unplug and hit the road?

The external drive goes with.
Looks like we will be getting the air but the smaller drive version. I think it's 126 gb's
We have an external with plenty of room so that should be fine.
We are waiting for a check to come in next week so we'll pick this up n Monday or tuesday.
Sam, I looked at that bluray disc drive and see that it's plug and play for DVD but bluray needs an additional bit of software that isn't included.
Is this the case for that or did I read it wrong?

 

[Steve Tannehill]

You need something like this to play blu-ray...
http://www.bluray-player-software.com/features.htm

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Quote:

You don't mind not having your iTunes library when you unplug and hit the road?

[COLOR= rgb(24, 24, 24)]Nope. The music is on my iPod. I just need to access my Music[/COLOR]
[COLOR= rgb(24, 24, 24)]on my desktop or iMac when I am adding more. [/COLOR]




Quote:

Looks like we will be getting the air but the smaller drive version. I think it's 126 gb's

You know what? If that gets you into an SSD drive, that's fine.
As long as you are mainly using it for mail, web surfing and a
few pieces of software you will be a-okay.




Quote:

but bluray needs an additional bit of software that isn't included.

Correct. MacGo makes a Blu-ray Player software. Think it's about $40.
You will need it to play Blu-rays. If you want to burn to a Blu-ray then
Roxio Toast is your best bet, though there are cheaper methods.

 

[TonyD]

This is a little bit of why I think my wife and to a lesser degree me, was thinking of getting the mbp since it already ncluudes a disc drive, has the bigger hdd and is the same price or cheaper if using the school discount.
we have decided to get the air but I'm not thrilled about needing additional software if I want to use a feature of a disc drive.
I probably don't even need the bluray feature on the air anyway so might not even buy the extra software needed.
Maybe I'll look for a less expensive DVD drive.
Oh, in the section that tells her what type of computer she needs it says she should have a laptop with a
Minimum hdd of 512 gb's .
I'm not sure why it needs to be that large. We can use the external for that if it's an issue I guess.
Actually maybe it says 512 mb's. I'll look again tommorrow.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Tony,

This has really turned into a rather frustrating
decision-making experience for you both.

You only need the additional software if you
want to take full advantage of Blu-ray since
(as you are aware) OS X does not support it.

I thought perhaps you would do all of this
piecemeal. Perhaps buy a portable BD drive
but use it as a DVD drive for now and eventually
you would ease your way into BD burning and
playback. I hate to recommend throwing everything
at someone all at once.

While I personally would never buy a laptop with
less than 500GB of HD space, you need to understand
that I load a great deal of software on my computer.
From what you are telling me, your laptop will be used
for much simpler purposes so I am thinking if you keep
your music library off of it, the 200GB+ should suffice.

We keep pushing the SSD drive because it represents
the future of PC devices. Once you experience the speed
of an SSD drive you won't want a regular hard drive again.
As SSD prices continue to plummet, more people will be
turning away from spinning drives. You are actually buying
something that is future-proof.

Absolutely, if I were in your shoes, I would be looking
at the Macbook Air with a SSD drive that meets your
budget. I think you both will be thrilled by it.

Good Luck, Tony. I know this is tough. Whatever you
both end up purchasing, we will be highly supportive of
it here. Keep us posted.

 

[TonyD]

Ron I know you need a bigger hd and I really don't.
My wife will decide on the size of the air we get but we are getting the air.
You guys talked me into the blu-ray drive too.
Of course I knew you guys would also stear me in the right direction.
One other thing that the apple store offered is a $100 apple gift card which they won't give us if we price match the Best Buy price
Which happens to be $25 better.
So the air is $50 off and a $100 apple gc as a school discount.
I'm looking forward to this. I discovered a free app in the Mac app store called iBook Author that
Looks very good. It's a book writing tool that lets you upload a book into the iBook store.
Can't get this app with the old MacBook because it's basically obsolete as far as OS is concerned.

 

[Sam Posten]

Cool to hear you have settled on a plan. One thing to add that it looks like you didn't catch: the optical drive in the MBP is DVD only. It's literally 12 year old technology. If you wanted BluRay capability on that device you have to go external or a very expensive 3rd party shipment solution to retrofit after purchase. And even then you will need additional software. OSX as you know does not support BluRay movie playback from prepackaged materials but you can add in software that will let you rip and play. It is slow and disk intensive.

 

[Steve Tannehill]

we have decided to get the air but I'm not thrilled about needing additional software if I want to use a feature of a disc drive.
I probably don't even need the bluray feature on the air anyway so might not even buy the extra software needed.
Maybe I'll look for a less expensive DVD drive.

One thing to keep in mind is that the DVD Player software is included, standard. Even the MacBook Pro does not play blu-ray. Apple does not include blu-ray software because their DVD drive does not play blu-ray. You have to go third-party to get a blu-ray drive and blu-ray playback software.
Considering that the Samsung blu-ray drive is just $5 more than the stand-alone Apple DVD drive, you are indeed better off getting the blu-ray drive. Plus it's a recorder.
Edit, just seeing Sam's response...covering the same ground.
I just ordered the Samsung drive and a spindle of BD-R discs. I want it for backups (through Roxio Toast, which I have) and I am also interested in ripping some of my blu-rays for access on the iPad and Apple TV.

 

[DaveF]

Originally Posted by TonyD /t/322655/air-or-mb-what-do-i-lose-or-gain/30#post_3956626
Oh, in the section that tells her what type of computer she needs it says she should have a laptop with a
Minimum hdd of 512 gb's .
I'm not sure why it needs to be that large. We can use the external for that if it's an issue I guess.

Ignore the salesperson, get what you need. Look at your current hard drive use and go from there.

For a counter example:
I'm using 170 GB of a 500 GB drive on my MBP.
My wife uses 290 GB of a 640 GB drive on her iMac. That includes a 32 GB Windows partition, years of photos and all her pro graphic design work.

And if your music or video libraries are not stored on the internal drive, what you need will go down quite a lot.

 

[Thomas Newton]

(Deleted post; ASCII matrix got all messed up and unreadable)

 

[TonyD]

Costco has a 2tb wifi based external, ao we'll be getting the smaller hd Air and using the external wifi drive as needed.