Thinking about buying my wife one for her 40th. Any comments / advice? I know some folk are not too enamoured with Apple products, but Mrs Mitch likes them.

Lovely little things. Mine gathers dust though as tablets are better for casual use.

Lovely little things. Mine gathers dust though as tablets are better for casual use.

Absolutely. We have one for general browsing and light spreadsheeting and whatnot, delightful. We also got one off the Apple refurb store so saved £100 or so.

Unless she’s doing busywork on it that actually requires a proper keyboard though, maybe an iPad would be better?

Yeah, I know what you mean. Jude (Mrs Mitch) uses her ipad at work (she’s an O.T tutor), but needs something a bit more powerful for assignments and stuff.

Then I can’t see a reason why not.

Apart from the eleven hundred quid price tag …

+1

I bought mine because my tablet was too limiting.

My iPad hasn’t really had a look in since I got my Air.

Having just watched our IT dept. spend nearly 2hrs on trying to get flash to work on firefox on my windows work laptop I would say go for the Macbook pro. My Dell work laptop cost £950, my personal macbook (2009) cost £900. Macbook has never gone wrong. Dell is the help desk every other week.

Just got one cause of work stuff that couldn’t do on iPad. lovely and really enjoying it, but unless you need the capacity then its an expensive toy.

Unless there is a particular reason you want Apple then there is a wide range of so called Windows powered ‘Ultrabooks’ which tend to be better value (in terms of specification at least) and almost as nice looking.

If you want to stick witht he Apple Ecosystem then the Powerbooks are IMHO the better route to go.

Cheers

Danny B

Love mine, got it via the education LINK was going around, got £150 off and 3 years warranty, i sold a unibody pro for the air and do not regret it one bit.

Lovely machines IMO. I was at a tech developers conference last year and almost everyone seemed to have one.

I was at a tech developers conference last year and almost everyone seemed to have one.

Got to be said this is the one thing that’s selling Apple to me, that and you can install Ubuntu on them so you’re not limited to MacOS.

My work machine is an Acer S3. Looks lovely, is as light and with SSD Drive it flies….Screen is not as good though, and W8 while growing on me daily, is not perfect.

Love my MacBook Air.

If you want to stick witht he Apple Ecosystem then the Powerbooks are IMHO the better route to go.

Apple haven’t made Powerbooks since early 2006. Way to recommend Grandad!

Lol.

The Air is spot on – we all use them for web development at work – plenty powerful enough to run Photoshop and large InDesign files too.

Of course you have to bear in mind the small storage so if she wants to use it got all her pictures and music she would be better off with a Pro – seen some good deals on them recently too.

Either the Air or the Pro are equally good. A solid state disk does make them even sweeter.

I’ve a retina MacBook Pro and it’s a lovely, lovely machine. Looking at the screen of any other laptop now just see,s wrong…

Rachel

You know what I mean Dougal – the other Powerbook. Whatever they call their laptops that actually do stuff 😉 Macbook? Think I’m there now.

Cheers

Danny B

Danny – you have clearly never used an Air then so your opinion doesn’t count 😉

Oh – one thing to remember with the Air (and, indeed, the retina Pro) is the main memory is soldered directly on to the motherboard so cannot be expanded.

If you do buy an Air, make sure it has absolutely as much main memory as possible. Mine has 8GB and that’s just enough for me.

Edit – just had a look and 8GB is extra £80. Buy it. Sell a kidney or whatever but do buy the memory…

Rachel

They are fabulous.

However, does she need the ultra light portability and is she happy with less storage ? I stopped using my MacBook once I got an iPad, I added a MacMini as main computing device with screen alternating between normal monitor and tv. Fr the same budget you could do a few different things. Apple Tv is very useful for driving content onto tv from iPhone/iPad…

I wouldn’t say you need 8Gb for running Office / Write whatever – my 2006 MBP with 2Gb and a standard HDD does this more than adequately.

That said, for £80 it’d be rude not too!

Mac Mini / iPad combo is a good shout though – I’m on Hackintosh / iPad at the mo and will replace the Hack with a Mac Mini now they have a real graphics card (ish) as I can’t be arsed with some of the patch malarkey anymore. Hope to swing an Air through work though as they are rather lovely things.

I’ve had mine for two years daily use, and the only time it struggles with only 4GB is when doing heavy stuff in Windows in Parallels whilst also doing heavy stuff in MacOS. That said, the SSD is so fast, paging isn’t the brick wall in performance that you’d get with a traditional HD.

The only faults I can pick are it can get very hot, which can be a problem if it’s also hot weather (guessing not such an issue in the UK…) The trouble is that its main cooling mechanism is using its aluminium body shell as a heat sink, which doesn’t work if it’s upwards of 40C outside! The battery’s not as good as it used to be after two years also, and as it’s non-replacable, I’d say that’ll be what will limit its usefulness for me in the longer term. That said, I still get 6-8 hours out of it if not using it for CPU heavy stuff.

Echoing much of ^^ – I used my late 2011 Air daily, mainly to do admin on the train commute home. Grand little machine, pretty robust (stood up well to travelling back and forth to work every day without a hitch) and the battery was still in remarkably good condition when I sold in early this year. All my storage is on dropbox (docs) or external HDD (pics + music) anyway so limited space was never an issue. +1 for maxxing out the RAM too.

I only moved back to a 17″ MBP as I’m working from home more now and coding on a 11″ screen can get a little tiresome. Mine was also a refurb and it made no difference to the resale value; I think I bought it for £640 odd and sold it for £400 which is pretty good going.

We’re moving and I’ll probably be going back to a longer commute in which case I’ll probably buy another.

had my macbook 3 years now. daily use. has never missed a beat, i cant recommend them enough.

I went for the standard MacBook as it is still user serviceable. In standard form I didn’t think it that quick. Changing mem to 8gb and the drive to SSD it is now much quicker – although no better than a similarly specced windows machine. Its plenty small enough to be convenient on the move and not too shabby to work all day from.

If you go for an MBA you will not be able to upgrade it. I’d suggest getting one with 8GB mem.

This is a bit leftfield, but how about a Samsung Chromebook and a holiday? Save £600 plus!

If it’s for the web, and casual document use, they will perform very similarly and the Chromebook is the most secure platform you can buy right now.

Battery life is 6-8 hours.

They even look much the same. I’d say you should try one at least.

Air here, had it a few years and its still as good as the day I got it

I got my Air from the refurb store – was meant to be standard but when I checked, it was 8gb. Bargain.

This is a bit leftfield, but how about a Samsung Chromebook

not a bad suggestion TBH

not a bad suggestion TBH

+1