TELA Laptops - Macs Mac Pro v's Mac Air

[Dave Young]

Hi everyone

Have any schools updated their TELA Mac fleet to MacBooks Airs over the Macbook Pro?

We have a bunch to roll over next year. Any feedback on how the the Mac Airs have held up and performed?

Some users are a bit rough on the gear - but I am sure over mechanical HD compared to SSD.

Thanks

Dave

[Keith Craig]

Dave,

We are not part of TELA but we have a large fleet of Macs. Two key things to watch: out of the box the MBA has no optical drive and secondly the amount of storage in the new machines. We had staff with MBP with 500Gb HDD going down to 256Gb SDD.  Most of them this was not a problem but Art Department we ended up getting them an external USB hard drive to store material from previous years.

Regards

Keith

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[Craig Knights]

also different chargers, which may or may not be a problem..  no ethernet port...

Craig

[eaton...@gmail.com]

The TELA MBAs come with an optical drive and thunderbolt-Ethernet adapter in the box.
In real-world use they are a lot faster for most tasks due to the SSD and get more than twice the battery life at half the weight over the MBPs. Teachers especially notice the battery life and weight improvements.

Pete

Monday, 1 December 2014 12:29 pm +1300 from Keith Craig <kei...@dilworth.school.nz>:

[Ict Manager]

we had one dropped, landed on and smashed (not sure the mbp would have done any better) and consistent problems with 2.4ghz wifi/bluetooth when both are enabled. (we have one AP per room with careful channel /power management but apparently the bluetooth does not play nice in that kind of busy environment). 5ghz is ok.

small hard drive is an issue, and we had two ssd failures with earlier macbook airs but none this year. you'll not recover anything if one fails.

tela comes with external dvd player and thunderbolt ethernet. only big gripe is lack of USB ports (there's one), otherwise all but the most power hungry user have been happy.

[Simon Farrell]

Hi guys,

Does anyone else have any more feedback on this?

The poor old MD101 13" MacBook Pros are getting pretty long in the tooth now, and haven't been updated by Apple since July (?) of 2012. So once they go on a 3-year TELA lease, they'd be almost six year old technology by the time the lease ended. Not great. So I'm really keen to hear feeedback on how suitable the MacBook Air is, slotting into the TELA options. The drop to 256GB storage is not ideal, but upgrading to anything larger presents a number of difficulties...

Thanks,
Simon

[Craig Knights]

We were just told, no more MBP's on TELA, going to be all Retinas and Airs.  No more HDD's.

Will be interesting to see if the prices change.

ta

CJK

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[flow in]

retinas would be nice. 

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[Pete Mundy]

Heya Simon

Each week I work on literally dozens of different TELA MBPs and MBAs and I have to say I cringe each time I open the screen on a MBP these days.

The brand new TELAs with Mavericks (or Yosemite) are treacle-slow, even before the user starts putting any of their data or apps on. Just setting them up for user accounts, wifi & printing (at the schools that don't have an imaging system) is painfully slow, and that's on the bare TELA image OS!

It all boils down to the lack of SSD. The MBP is a reasonably powerful machine, but it is so I/O bound by the spinning rust that the overall performance of the machine is perceived to be far less than it really is. It's such a waste having all that processing power sitting there twiddling it's caches waiting for bytes to trickle in from the SATA bus.

I don't think I could ever personally buy another new computer that employes a hard drive as the main boot volume (or even a hybrid hard drive!), and until SSD becomes standard fare in TELA MBPs, my recommendation to almost all education users is to get the air option instead, and to augment it with an external USB HD.

Hope this 'coalface' experience helps your decision process :)

Pete

[Craig Knights]

The word from the apple employee at a course this week is all SSD for Tela. Real soon.