What would you do with $1800?

Discussion in 'MacBook Air' started by dgnr8, Jun 12, 2012.

  1. dgnr8 macrumors member

    Nov 13, 2010
    I know there have been many threads about this, but if you are bored the advice would be nice.

    I just received a grant for $1800 to buy a laptop. I have a 3 year old 13 inch Macbook pro, I am at work right now so I don't have the processor specs, but I know that I have 4gigs of ram and a 1 terabyte hard drive.

    I'm a teacher so I don't do many intense things with my laptop. I watch a lot of video (I have 400gigs worth on my laptop), 100 gigs of photos, barely any music and 2000 ebooks. I randomly use iMovie (maybe twice a year).
    I use my 64gb 3rd generation ipad almost all day, so my laptop only gets used when I am working on research.

    So now to my decision. My laptop still works beautifully, but the grant funding has been given to me so that I use the laptop for iPad specific research. It sounds stupid, but the grant also comes with 10 ipads so they want a mac laptop to.

    I am not the type to use 2 laptops so the new laptop would replace my current one. Here are my 4 choices:

    New 13inch Macbook air with an i7 processor and 256gb of storage
    -this means I use an external hard drive and start to depend on cloud storage.

    Refurbished 13inch Macbook air with an i7 processor
    -with the refurb savings I could probably afford a 512gb ssd upgrade that I would buy separately.

    New 13 inch Macbook pro with an i7 processor
    -I am only worried that this is not going to feel like an upgrade. I don't think I will feel the speed difference because I don't do complicated things on my laptop. I do get the hard drive storage which I like having.

    Refurbished 13 inch Macbook pro with an i7 processor
    -Since I probably won't notice the speed difference maybe a refurb would save some money and allow me to buy accessories.

    My current Macbook pro never leaves the house because I find it so bulky compared to my iPad. Sorry this has been so long winded, but I need to spend the money by Friday and I have been so conflicted.
  2. rygamble macrumors regular

    Feb 1, 2012
    I think if you are having to do iPad-specific research you would greatly benefit from a Retina display. I say sell your MacBook Pro, use some of those earnings along with the grant, and get the next generation Pro 15".
  3. JesseW6889 macrumors 6502

    Dec 12, 2010
    I'd go with the 13" air. It has the resolution of a 15" MacBook Pro and the same screen real estate as the 15" Retina MacBook Pro also (same size, just double the pixels to make it sharper, like the iPad 2 compared to the new iPad)

    The Air's now come with up to 512Gb SSD's now too, so maybe that'd help?

    For its size and speed, I think it'd be perfect for what you want.

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