MacBook Pro vs MacBook Air

No longer the nouveau belle of Apple's laptop line, the MacBook Pro has taken the backseat in Apple's advertising push as the company attempts to dazzle the public with the svelte figure of the new MacBook Airs. About two weeks ago, I was forced to decide between the ageing powerhouse Pro and the gorgeous new contender - the Air. My early-2006 polycarbonate MacBook was a mere month away from its 5th birthday, and its meagre hardware specs and dated software were taking their toll.

Originally, my choice was between the 13 inch varieties of both the Air and the Pro. Though, on paper, the choice seemed one of power vs portability, further investigation revealed an entirely different story. Because of its pioneering use of flash storage soldered straight onto the motherboard, the Air was actually just as fast, if not faster than the Pro at many day-to-day tasks. The reason? The MacBook Pro, like most computers, uses a hard drive for storage. Hard drives have moving parts and, as a result, are much slower and less reliable than Solid State Drives (aka Flash). The catch? SSDs are very, very expensive - a 500GB SSD costs around £500 more than a 500GB Hard Drive.

The SSD gave the Air a definitive advantage over the 13 inch Pro - the performance was similar, but the portability and form factor seemed to tip the balance of power toward the Air. Unfortunately, the MacBook Air comes with half the RAM of the Pro (2GB vs 4GB) as standard, with an £80 upgrade for the Air putting them on level footing. A few minutes surfing Apple's website later, I realised that to get a large enough drive and enough RAM, the Air would cost over £400 more than the cheapest Pro. Are the SSD and portability worth that hefty premium? For some, undoubtedly so. But for me, doubt loomed over my shoulder, peering closer with every passing second.

To add insult to injury, I quickly spotted that the maxed-out MacBook Air costed the same amount as a 15 inch MacBook Pro. And therein lay my answer. The Core i5 processor found in the base 15 inch Pro easily bested the Core 2 Duo processors found in the Air and 13 inch Pro models. 4GB of RAM came standard, as did a hard drive larger than that on the Air and the Pro.


The extra screen real-estate, the extra ports, the faster processor and the equal price tag of the 15 inch Pro easily bested the thin frame and ultra-portable design of the MacBook Air.

A further analysis of my time using the 15 inch Pro is coming soon. Two main points stand out however:

a) Those two inches make an unbelievable amount of difference to the experience of using the screen

b) During graphics intensive tasks, especially gaming, the heat of the laptop is such that it may leave you without a lap. Or a top.