2011 Macbook Air 13" or 2011 Macbook Pro 17"? Which to get?

Hello there, I just bought my 2011 17" macbook pro exactly one week ago from Best Buy (They have a 36 month 0% financing deal going on at mine) and I just downloaded and installed OS X Lion on it yesterday and I'm pretty happy with it. HOWEVER,if there's one thing Apple knows how to do and so well, it's market. I'm kind of drooling over the new 13" Macbook Air (1.7Ghz, 4gb Ram, the high end one) that they just released and now I'm completely torn on which one I should get. I usually have a whole lot of music and pictures on my mac (about 15gb worth...i guess not that much really) and I mostly use it for emailing, web-surfing, networking, etc...But I also like to do some casual gaming like with N.O.V.A. 2, etc. I just need opinions on what the best choice would be for me? I know the Air has a smaller screen and all and that its performance will be less than that of the 17" Pro, but given all that i'm still torn as I dont know which I would like better. I like the fact that the air powers on instantly, its a little more portable (even though I hardly ever move my macbook rpo unless its from the table to my bed) I guess I'm just trying to get ideas on which everyone else prefers or what they would recommend?

It's real difficult to compare those two models, because you have an uneven playing field in the HDD category. The speed and responsiveness of the SSD in the MacBook Air is a real game changer. But the overall CPU/GPU horsepower package in the 17" will absolutely destroy the lower powered 1.7 (or 1.8) i5/i7 with the paltry Intel 3000 HD GPU.
Day-to-day usage, again due to the SSD, would definitely give the impression that it's faster, snappier and more responsive. But in games, even like N.O.V.A 2 the dedicated GPU would really shine.
For what you use the machine for, I'm honestly surprised you went with the 17" MBP in the first place. That's a beast of a machine, sounds very overkill for what you've described.

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Message was edited by: leroydouglas
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2011 Macbook Air 13" or 2011 Macbook Pro 17"? Which to get?

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