Mac Book Air

Quote from Maverick74:

Thanks guys for all the comments. OK, I should have been more specific here. I was not intending to use this as a trading computer except in an emergency perhaps when traveling. The problem I have with laptops in general is I never really found them that easy to travel around with either within the city you live or traveling across country. The weight and size is enough of an annoyance to just make you want to leave it at home.

This is why I liked the mac book air. It's so small and light you would almost forget you even have it with you. Which brings me to my next question. I'm also looking at just getting the new i-pad. As someone said, the i-pad really can do pretty much anything an air mac could do and it's even smaller and lighter and easier to use when traveling.

So my logic was to get the mac book air as a recreational laptop for any typing based stuff you have to do. I really can't see how typing could ever be easy or fluid on that i-pad. And then use the i-pad as the travel item.

I already have a Dell Precision laptop with a huge screen that is perfect for trading. The problem I have with trading on laptops is not the performance issue but rather the lack of screen real estate. I really need a lot of screens and I have never found it easy to trade on a single screen laptop.
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Just keep in mind, mac air runs a real os and you can dual boot it with windows 7 easily. Ipad uses apple's mobile os which means you cannot run any java programs, no flash, no windows 7 etc.. If you dont care about any of that stuff and just want to use it for email and browsing then ipad is perfect, but if you want to say run tws or do some development/testing of your ats then you are out of luck with ipad.
 
Quote from Bingoking:

If you have IB as your broker you can trade straight up on your Mac without a dual boot.
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it's just a java swing app launched from webstart so yes anything that have java runtime can use it. Ipad cannot
 
Quote from newguy05:

unproven? it's been proven beyond a reasonable doubt ;)

solid state drive are much more reliable than the traditional mechanical drives, and they are order of magnitude faster. People usually go for the big cpu and memory but they dont realize the hard drive is the single most important performance factor in a computer, getting a powerful computer with a 7200rpm will be like driving a porsche with wooden wheels..

Until recently there is no alternative to the 7200rpm except the raptor 10k which is marginal improvement, now there is a mass of very fast ssd at a reasonable price, there is no excuse to continue use the old mechanical hdd.
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Ok that's good to hear. Although I heard that the data issues would come in later years of the hard drive's life. And so far it seems like SSDs have less storage capacity.
 
I'm about to buy the 13" macbook air for my girlfriend. It will just be used for web and writing and facebook.

The SSD drive means long battery life which is the main reason I'm going with the air. Also it's easy to travel with.

Runningbear
 
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