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Consolidating My Apple Hardware: Laptops or Desktops or Both

G

GWestphal

Golden Member
I have an old P35 hackintosh with Q6600, and a new iPhone 5S and iPad Air.

I have been hankering for a new laptop as my 7 year old original Atom netbook makes angels cry.

I was tempted by the 13in MBA but the non-IPS screen still is a killer for me.

The next step up is the 13in MBP, but fully tricked out it is $2600 and at that price I could get the 15in MBP or for a couple hundo more get that one fully tricked out at $3300.

What does $700 get you in the 13 vs 15:
+Quad cores that are faster
+Discrete graphics 750M
+Bigger screen
+CUDA support for HPC development/testing
-Slightly less portable
-2-3 hours less battery

Primary use case: report writing, software development, light gaming the only games I've played in the past 5 years has been starcraft 2 and diablo 3 and both only for a couple weeks.

Is the 13in really significantly more portable than the 15in? Is the additional performance worth the money and the drop in battery? Can a 13in drive the 27in CinemaDisplay 30 fps in Starcraft 2?

How does the 13in, 15in compare performance wise to the 27in iMac? Pretty comparable?

I've been mulling around the 15in and getting rid of the hackintosh or using it as a headless server, then I'd only have one computing device to manage. Then I could get a 27in cinema display and wireless keyboard, mouse, trackpad and a dock. I could even get a Mac mini to hook up to the Cinema display if I wanted some ability to compute.


That would be a pretty sleek setup that does all the things I need it to do and consolidates my computer/file management tasks.


MBP fully tricked out
27in CinemaDisplay (wait for the upgrade obviously)
wireless keyboard
wireless mouse
wireless trackpad
Clique keyboard holder
Henge dock
Time Capsule
Crashplan
One Additional External (for Crashplan)
Apple TV (A7 update that should be coming shortly)
Mac mini (optional)

So that would be:

iPhone for attached to the hip connectivity
iPad for remote board gaming, couch youtube surfing, note taking and ebooks
ATV for netflixing and photo sharing
MBP for central computing hub, productivity, software dev
CinemaDisplay and peripherals for putting it into desktop work mode
All nicely backed up to two onsite locations and one offsite location.
 
GWestphal said:
Is the 13in really significantly more portable than the 15in? Yes absolutely. Much smaller footprint.

Is the additional performance worth the money and the drop in battery? Subjective, depends on what you do (and obviously how often you do it). For mundane tasks, absolutely not. For heavy processing tasks, yes.

Can a 13in drive the 27in CinemaDisplay 30 fps in Starcraft 2? Integrated Intel graphics cannot run anything at 2560x1600 besides a slideshow. It could be just fine however at 1920x1200, depends on the game and your image quality settings.

How does the 13in, 15in compare performance wise to the 27in iMac? Pretty comparable? Again depends on the task. See answer above.
Click to expand...


TLDR, see my responses above.
 
If you are going to play games, the 13" MBP is useless. The top-spec 15" MBP is going to to demolish the 13" and be pretty much the same as the iMac. Not as good tho.


Otherwise it's a toss up between portability of the 13" vs 15"


Also, the difference in battery is only 1hr not 2-3 on the 13" vs 15"
 
I'm curious how you go from considering a MBA to the next step being only the "fully tricked out" rMBPs? Especially since you're currently using 6 and 7 year old vintage hardware. (ie, virtually any new machine will be a major upgrade in performance from those, let alone fully tricked out).

For your needs, you couldn't use say, the base $2600 15" rMBP?

And if you're even considering a 'tricked out' 13" rMBP, then why wouldn't a base-level 15" rMPB suit you?

At any rate, I'm venturing a guess (since desktop-replacement seems a pretty high priority) that you may be better served considering nothing less than then 15" rMBP- just which exact spec. If you're willing to go for the 'fully tricked out' then, why not? If anything, at least you'll be pretty well future-proofed.
 
Well the MBA would be great with a retina screen, quad core, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, and discrete graphics if they could keep the battery around 12 hrs and include that, just add a couple mm of thickness.

But yeah, as a desktop replacement that I would like to last a few years, the 15in seems the way to go.
 
GWestphal said:
Well the MBA would be great with a retina screen, quad core, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, and discrete graphics if they could keep the battery around 12 hrs and include that, just add a couple mm of thickness.

But yeah, as a desktop replacement that I would like to last a few years, the 15in seems the way to go.
Click to expand...

Why not ask for a pony in there while you're at it?
 
15" retina is the way to go, especially with the 750m 2GB. It's fast enough to be a desktop-replacement computer and it can handle Diablo 3 at 2880x1800 at medium-high settings.
 
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