Had a hardware nightmare with graphics chip on my MBP and hard drive on 27" iMac failing within 24 hours of each other leaving me with nothing! Aaaaargh.
Funds are limited. Have option of a new Macbook Air with upgrade i7 processor, 8GB Ram and 512GB SSD. Anyone have experience of running RW7 / 8 with some fairly large projects on a Macbook Air? I don’t need mega performance but equally don’t want things grinding to a halt.
That is exactly the spec of my MacBook Air and I had no trouble running it with a 350/400 page site. Having said that, I am having a couple of issues with that site on RW8.03, but from what I can gather it should be sorted with 8.1
When my 2008 iMac went up in flames (quite literary!) following a succession of other costly hardware repairs I designated my mid-2011 MacBook Air as my main machine. It only has a 1.6 Ghz Intel Core i5 processor, 4 GB of RAM, Intel HD Graphics 3000 and 128 GB of SSD storage. But it absolutely flies-along and has no issues whatsoever running both RW7 and RW8; and the huge project files you lot often send me to troubleshoot!
I would imagine any newer or more spec’ed-out MacBook Air would work just as well or even better.
Obviously I have an external monitor plugged in, a decent sound system, wireless keyboard, keypad, mouse and various other accessories. To combat the virtually non-existent 128 GB internal storage, I invested into a Western Digital Thunderbolt Duo external drive system - which gave me an extra 4 TB of RAID-1 secure storage to offload all my big files and backups onto. This whole setup has worked adequately for me, for nearly 4 years.
In that time I have saved-up enough to buy a Mac Pro and at least 2 cinema displays. But Apple’s hardware offerings are so woeful for the expert market right now, I am “making do” with what I have for as long as possible. I prefer the reliability and flexibility of a modular setup that I can ‘custom build’ myself. The iMac was a lemon and I can’t see myself going back to an ‘all in one’ configuration, after all the grief the last one gave me.
Interesting that you say it flies along. My wife and daughter both have MB Airs and, whilst they don’t do CPU intensive work, they also fly along and have never had any issues.
New from the Apple Store, this Air is £1384 and I can pick it up today. I now also have a the option of a MBP 15" 2015 with 1GB SSD, Quad core i7 2.8GHz for £1599 with 1 year warranty from trusted source - which I can also pick up today. Decisions decisions!
Definitely the 15" MPB
Yes I have no complaints about the speed of the Air. Tasks like exporting video will cause the fans to spin-up and things to slow down. However for your normal day-to-day computing, they are good machines.
If buying in the UK, it is worth looking at John Lewis too. They usually match Apple’s prices for the basic configurations and give you a free 2 year no-quibble guarantee. Looking at their website right now, they have a couple of MacBooks reduced to clear. Apple also have a number of refurbs listed on the UK site.
I bought both my MacBooks from John Lewis to take advantage of the 2 year warranty.
Stormfront offer 3 years. The problem with both however is getting a custome spec. They tend to just sell the standard configs as far as I am aware.
This is what I went for in the end. Looks a very clean machine. Owned by Apple certified engineer with 1 year warranty thrown in. Being cleaned in the morning and mine by lunchtime - then I can get back to work!
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