My partner is about to buy one of these.

Currently looking at This

She doesn’t keep much music or video at the moment. Has a moderate number of photos, but I’m talking with her about using external hard drives for data and media stuff.

Any comments?
Budget won’t stretch to a Pro.
Is a 128gb SSD enough?
If some one offered you 256 but only 4gb of RAM which would you take?

Ta

Take the 8gb ram over the space. MacBook air is designed to be quick light and portable – only keep what you need on there and use a storage drive on a network for larger files. A couple of San disk ultra fit 64gb sub drives will give you the extra space when you need it for £20 each if you do need extra space sometimes.

I keep mine around 1/2 full even with a dual boot win 8 system on there too with no problems that’s 128gb and everything else is stored in the cloud. When I’m away extra stuff goes on the mini usb drives above.

Oh and if no rush that model appears on the apple refurb store for £799, it’s often up there worth checking for a couple of days. Full 2yr warranty etc.

What’s she got currently?

My air has 512gb ssd and I have used 228 without really trying. (have a desktop PC at home for games etc and 2TB NAS drive).

There is a bunch of music on there about 60gb of photos and 10 or so films. Also runs Parallels with a Win7 image.

TBH when I purchased I just maxed everything I could ram/processor/hard drive as it was a long term buy.

Not sure any of that helps but these days its very easy to use lots of storage, yes the ‘cloud’ is there but I’m frequently away and ‘off line’ so like to carry stuff with me.

MacBook air is designed to be quick light and portable – only keep what you need on there and use a storage drive on a network for larger files.

How much does data weigh?

My opinion is buy the best spec you can, it’ll last you longer.

get one of the slimline micro sd adapters with a 64gb card and use that for music storage, its what i do on my MBP, its slow to read/write but fine for storing music, not tried it with films for playback but its probably fast enough.

Thanks

She can get a corporate discount at PC world which helps
Currently has a dying windows xp laptop with no coherent back up or storage policies
Won’t be storing films or videos or much music
Getting her to use time machine will be a plus too.

Looks like the 8gb ram is the way to go

8gb for sure. Prefer RAM over storage – yes I use more storage than that but 1TB and 512GB drives are so small and portable now.

Having just bought a Mac Book with 256gb SSD and no option to upgrade it I was concerned about using up space with music. I opted for a Niftydrive which just slots into the SD card reader and takes a Micro SD card to store the music on. I don’t often use the SD card reader so having a card fitted in there isn’t an issue for me. It’s a relatively cheap way of adding additional storage up 128gb for files that don’t require the speed of an SSD.

OP, others have already said this but definitely the 8GB RAM, with the new Macs (and many windows laptops) you cannot upgrade this later and everything will run better with 8. 12GB ssd can be enough, it really depends how much music, films etc you store and you say she doesn’t do much. My daughter doesn’t store much and she uses just 75GB ! External drives are really cheap a 1tb one costs £50 and you can buy an external SSD if you really want fast storage, if you get one with USB3 it will be as fast as being inside the machine. You can upgrade the SSD later if you wish but it will void the warranty so you may wish to wait till after 12 or 24 months.