27" iMac 2011 & 11" MBA 2011 > 15" rMBP 2012

whiskycycle

whiskycycle

whiskycycle

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31 May 2004
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The 'Toon, UK, in Europe
Have been thinking about my computing habits of late since I bought the MBA in March and in the last few weeks I've noticed I'm not using the iMac as much....

This got me thinking: "should I ditch the iMac & MBA, get a rMBP and use that for everything?".

Things like music, photos, videos etc I've got stored on a NAS and backup up multiple times offline.... I do a little bit of WoW gaming and that's about it along those lines. App-wise, it's iWork, iPhoto and the like, some tinkering with GarageBand, ripping DVDs to watch around the house (I've a couple of extrernal region 1 and 2 drives for ripping). Also doing a little VM work using Parallels (I don't bother with Bootcamp), but I've an ML110G6 for the heavy lifting on that side of things.

Can anyone offer any thoughts/advice on this, or if anyone's done the same kind of change could they give me their 10 pence worth?

The only gotcha is the spousal acceptance factor of changing, but I should be able to sort that one ;-)
 
I decided a while ago that I wanted an OSX machine. I previously had a mediocre desktop (with dual 19" screens) and a pretty poor 15" laptop. I used the laptop more than the desktop, but with the driving force behind getting on OSX machine was application development purposes I knew my useage would change. My initial intention was to get an MBA in 2011. I canned this after finding out that an MBA couldn't do dual screen, and that a new Ivy Bridge was due.

I was deadset on the 13" form factor. I'd dismissed the 15" Pro has too big/bulky for my portability needs. However, when the 15" Retina was announced it changed things. Yes, it was a similar size but it was light and thin enough to be portable and held advantages over the MBA in terms of RAM and GPU.

So I bought one, and a pair of 24" monitors, keyboard and trackpad to use at my desk. Now I have one machine, I can use that out and about or on my desk at home. I don't have to maintain two installations with all my apps/files - it's much easier.

I too have a NAS that holds all my media, repos and is accessible externally from my LAN - so I'm not at all concerned with only 256gb of space on the MBP.

The only time I feel like a smaller laptop would be preferred is for general sofa browsing/looking things up. However I think that that is a gap best filled by a tablet, and intend to one of those rumoured mini iPads (serves as dual purpose as I need an IOS device to test apps on anyway).
 
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