Need advice on MacBook Air: New vs. Used

[fredhe12]

Looking for some advice on how to get best bang for my buck. I'm looking for a smallish, ultra portable laptop for heavy office work, web, watching videos, and light photo work. I use a Windows 7 PC at home for work, gaming, and heavy Adobe work, so this won't be my main rig by any means.

Also, I can't stand Windows 8 and touch screen laptops. I won't go near one of those things. There's a reason I have Windows 7 on my main machine.

I have an iPhone 6 and iPad mini, and used a MacBook Pro for about 2.5 years for work, so I'm no stranger to Apple OS. I actually like the integration between all my mobile devices when I working on the go. So that's why I'm really interested in MacBook Air.

My main question is should I go new or used?

I have a budget of about $700, give or take a $100. If need be, I can even stretch to $900. Given that, I'm considering either a brand new 4th or 5th gen 11" MBA. It would be 4gb/128SSD/i5 variety. There are some good deals on 4th gen in particular. I would really like a 13" screen, but other than 4th gen on clearance, I'm not finding good deals brand new. There are some decent deals for used or private party machines.

For example, found mid-2012 13" MBA, 8gb/128SSD/1.8 i5 w/ 6months of Apple Care for $700. Plenty of other deals in this arena as well.

What would everyone suggest? I'm comfortable with buying used to get more out of my budget, but I don't want to sacrifice too much in performance. Also, not sure what the implications of the various port changes Apple has made from mid-2012 to today. I don't normally keep up with those types of details on Apple hardware.

Any thoughts, suggestions, comments are highly appreciated!

Cheers!

 

[JAG87]

Personally, I find 11" too small for any serious work.

Like you mentioned, I would try to get a used 13", but a 2013 model that supports AC wireless and EFI booting. Preferably one that has some warranty left just in case you get sold a lemon. Even the one you found is pretty good, if you don't care about wifi speed (EFI booting is really just a bullet point feature that allows you to do some neat stuff with Windows).

Having said that, your budget is entering the used 13" rMBP territory, and I would gladly sacrifice portability for a retina display. But that may not apply to you.

 

[fredhe12]

Yeah, agree with the 11" - I think at this point, I'm going to focus on 13".

I do care about wifi speed. For my intended use, max wifi speed is critical since I'll mainly be using the cloud for storing and transferring files. So you're saying that between '12 and '13 there was a hardware change that improves wifi performance?

Retina display would be nice and not opposed to rMBP.

In terms of priority for these, what how should I look at it?

RAM? SSD Space? Processor speed? Model year? Graphics Card?

Thanks!

Personally, I find 11" too small for any serious work.

Like you mentioned, I would try to get a used 13", but a 2013 model that supports AC wireless and EFI booting. Preferably one that has some warranty left just in case you get sold a lemon. Even the one you found is pretty good, if you don't care about wifi speed (EFI booting is really just a bullet point feature that allows you to do some neat stuff with Windows).

Having said that, your budget is entering the used 13" rMBP territory, and I would gladly sacrifice portability for a retina display. But that may not apply to you.

 

[JAG87]

Starting in '13 they added 802.11ac which is faster wireless. But rest assure that this isn't going to make a lick of difference to your cloud storage speeds. That depends on your internet upload and download speed which is almost certainly going to be less than what even 802.11n can reach unless you have Google Fiber or live in Korea.

AC will come in handy for networked Time Machine backups and Airdrops between Macs... that's about it for now until gigabit internet becomes ubiquitous. If you don't care about that, or you think you will be replacing your laptop in the next 2-3 years anyway, then don't worry about it.

I think that you should try to get a retina Pro, if portability is not a major issue. The retina Pro is only slightly thicker and heavier than the Air, but the screen is 10x better. In terms of priority, personally I would go like this:

RAM - at least 8 GB, the more the better

Year - I would take a newer model vs a previous year, because it will likely have a better battery, GPU, and connectivity (i.e. thunderbolt 2, better wifi)

SSD - I would take a bigger SSD before I take a faster CPU

CPU - I really don't put any weight at all on CPU speed, because it really doesn't make any difference unless you're constantly encoding or rendering in Adobe CS. And you're better off doing that on the desktop.

 

[chubbyfatazn]

I was in your situation about a month ago and ended up getting an early 2011 13" non-Retina MBP for $350 used. Came with an i5, 8GB RAM, and a 320GB HDD. Swapped in an extra 16GB kit of memory and an extra SSD I had and it flies now.

Battery life is a little north of 4 hours with screen brightness at about 80% doing web browsing and stuff in Xcode. It was a used battery, but it was at 94% health, so not too bad.

As for weight, I have no complaints. I temporarily switched over from a T420 (Thinkpad, 14") which is a lot thicker and heavier.

I've read anecdotal reports that you can pick up one of the AC cards off ebay and fit it into older MBPs. The main issue I'm seeing is antenna length and/or just lack of antennas to begin with. There's also a third-party AC card available if you don't wanna use ebay.

I know the 2012 models (starting with Ivy Bridge) switched to USB 3 ports. I only use Thunderbolt for a DisplayPort connection so can't help you there.

I know it's not what you're looking for, but just wanted to point out older machines are still plenty capable. With your budget though I second JAG87's suggestion. The screen really does make a difference (not just in resolution).

 

[Rakehellion]

If you're on a budget, remember Apple has a refurbished store.

Direct from Apple with a full warranty.

http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/specialdeals/mac/macbook_air