Gadgetory

hi I'm Scott Stein it's back-to-school shopping time and it's time for that age-old question which 13-inch MacBook should I buy now this is a question because there are two 13-inch MacBook s' on the market the 13-inch MacBook Air and the 13-inch MacBook Pro and it's a little more of an important decision than what 15-inch do I buy I think because these are more affordable these are the max looks that people are going to gravitate to when they pay for a back-to-school laptop and they're more likely to fit to whatever bag you have now let's get into the nitty-gritty of both they both start at 1199 that's different than last year because the MacBook Air used to be $100 more expensive now they're at the same price so what are the differences well obviously the 13-inch air is a lot thinner and it's a lot lighter a little under three pounds whereas this one is 4.5 pounds that's not bad but it's going to feel heavier in your hand it's even a little hard for me to hold in one hand like this now the other differences are in terms of processor this has a lower speed technically Core i5 processor is a faster Core i5 processor they both are third generation Intel processors code-named Ivy Bridge but in our tests they both performed pretty equivalently why well one thing you can chalk it up to is SSD the faster storage that's built into this as a base configuration tends to produce faster boot times faster load times and that creates a zippier sense of performance that puts it on par with this laptop now you could put an SSD into this MacBook Pro but it's going to cost you extra money the other difference here is ports this has two USB 3.0 ports it also has a Thunderbolt port and an SD card slot this has two USB 3.0 ports a thunderbolt port an Ethernet port an SD card slot and a firewire 800 port for those who care about that that's a nice set of features plus it has an optical drive a slot loading DVD drive now let's go to screens they both have 13.3 inch screens the air actually has a higher resolution screen 1440 by 900 whereas this has a 1280 by 800 display now that's a small increase here but higher resolution is higher resolution and it also has a nicer anti glare future at least when I use both of these it seemed a little less glare prone on the air than on the pro upgradability well neither one of them has discrete graphics you can throw that out the window they both use intel HD 4000 integrated graphics and they perform pretty equivalently as far as playing games or any sort of work you'd want to do better than last year's models so bottom line which would you go with well last year I would have picked the pro but this year I'm going with the air the reason is that the air is more portable it's more forward-looking in the sense that this is the laptop that I think is going to be around in a couple of years and this laptop really represents a lot of what Apple is pushing in terms of the speed the ease of use the very quick instant on type of performance it's a little bit faster in terms of that boot up time and in terms of thatthat zippy instant speed now for back-to-school as well is going to be a lot easier to carry around in your backpack and the battery life is better about a half hour better at least on our tests so there you go as far as storage I consider this although you may want to consider bumping up to the $14.99 version with 256 gigabytes of storage or consider investing in a plug in external hard drive now that there's USB 3.0 you get a lot of fast cheap ones that do that I'm Scott Stein and that's a little guide to this year's 13-inch MacBook you