2013 Macbook Air - worth getting?

[ZesPak]

Woody said:

Cheers chaps - again!
Had a play on an 11" today in the Apple Store and I was surprised how well the screen worked - seems to be bigger than my 11" Lenovo.
Tempted by the 11" even though it has less expansion, the 18 months Apple Care on it must be well worth the difference.

Apple usually has 16:10 ratio, while lenovo uses 16:9.

Therefore, an 11" Apple will be ever so slightly bigger than the 11" lenovo. Higher resolution might of course also give this impression.
That said, the Lenovo might well be 10.6" which will give a big difference on that size.

http://www.displaywars.com/11-inch-16x9-vs-11-inch...

[Woody]

Thanks for the link - I've learnt something new!
Screen sizes (diagonal) are the same at 11.6" but different aspect ratios as you said.
The apple is slightly wider by about 0.5" but only 0.25" lower - so does give the overall appearance of being bigger.

[GCH]

13" is a lot more usable than the 11" (I have and have travelled with both), and I wouldn't be without my 256gb jetdrive lite (which holds a fairly large chunk of my music) which permanently lives in the SD slot.

[Woody]

Think I'm going to take a punt on the 13".
Bigger screen and SD card slot are going to swing it I think.

How does the 'Pages' programme compare with Word?
Had a quick play today and it seemed ok. Just wondering whether I should fork out for office or stuck with the inbuilt apps.

[ZesPak]

Woody said:

Think I'm going to take a punt on the 13".
Bigger screen and SD card slot are going to swing it I think.

How does the 'Pages' programme compare with Word?
Had a quick play today and it seemed ok. Just wondering whether I should fork out for office or stuck with the inbuilt apps.

It is 'ok'.
However, if you want to send and open files for other people, especially work related, just buy MS Office.

[Woody]

Thanks guys.
Have managed to bag the 2013 13" for a decent price.
Looking at picking up Office 2011 - shouldn't be any issues running this with the latest OS should there?

Cheers.

[HardtopManual]

OP - go for it. I bought a MacBook Air back in 2011 (admittedly the top of the range) and I still use it every day. It looks like it did the day I opened the box. It struggles a bit when editing GoPro footage, but is still speedy for everything else. The only money I've had to spend on it is to upgrade the SSD to 512GB. And it's still worth a few hundred quid.

ETA - oh, you bought it :-)

I run Office 2008 on the latest version of OS X (10.11.3), so I'm sure you'll be fine with the newer Office version.

[Woody]

Just to update/close out this - I picked up the 13" Air on Tuesday.

The wife was dead chuffed with it - major brownie points scored!!

It was dead simple to set up, MS office installed really easily (unlike my Win7 laptop....) and it just 'works'.

Quality of the product is superb - I now know why they are such a premium product - the engineering is fantastic!

Going to give the migration app a go tonight to sort out iTunes library and documents from her old laptop and also get it connected to the printer.

I should have 'gone Mac' sooner - I can see this getting expensive.....