Fwiw, My wife likes the "Air".
N Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ -----Original Message----- From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Saturday, January 03, 2015 3:18 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] advice on a most-portable computer Eric - As a Mac person, she doesn't have *lots* of choices, for better and/or worse: I can't imagine traveling without a screen/keyboard, depending on the kindness of strangers to provide a display and a keyboard, so I'd say MacBook Air or MacBook Pro is the *only* choice. With internal SSDs on the Pro's there probably isn't that much reason to go with the Air unless portability is her highest concern. A 13" could be sufficient but they top out at i5 dual-core with Intel Graphics. To get i7 Quad with nVidia Graphics she has to go to the high end 15" which impacts portability. Software compatibility should not be an issue. OS compatibility might be. If she is running older software to avoid the subscription model, that my keep her from running too new of an OS Rev... but likely not, it usually goes the other way (new software won't run on an old OS Rev). A safari-vest full of high density HDD or SSD (preferably thunderbolt) and SD (or other) memory cards should take care of the rest. The speed/latency of SSD over thunderbolt rivals SSD over PCIE and I believe beats HDD over PCIE. Keeping a baseline bootable SSD with all her software is probably a good measure and it is possible she can even boot from that on another Mac of similar OS Rev, but much of her software may be keyed to CPU or Mac, not Drive... so lots of license shenanigans might be required to take advantage of that. My 4Pi colleagues from England/Spain travel the world just like she is planning, doing similar (if not even more processor/data demanding) tasks. Their main advantage over her is there are two of them, so each has a machine as instant backup or overflow for the other... They also are prepared to order up a replacement machine "overnight" on demand and tend to do so once every 1-2 years, implying a full refresh of their hardware every 2-4 years. They also use up camera bodies (DSLR's have a shutter-lifetime and doing 9-shot HDR 360's is a good way to run through that!). She might very well, however go a long way with just an Air or smaller Pro and 2 thunderbolt SSDs. I do that myself (but with less intense demands) all the time (1 SSD, 4 HDDs). - Steve ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
