New MacBook Pros -- 15" or 17" ?

My current MacBook Pro (17”) has been ridden hard and put away wet. The hard disk is laboring, the screen has a bad defect, the motherboard wifi seems to have given up the ghost. And I’ve been riding up against disk limits and ram limits from the day I got it.

So thank goodness the new machines are out. Now I am trying to decide – 15 or 17” ?? I love the 17” screen but it is a beast to carry around and I’d like to think that I can get by with 15” for mobile use. Especially since I can bring up the iPad next to it and use that concurrently. The key things to consider:

* Weight. The 15” is a pound less. That is significant. * Processors. A wash, you can get the same processors with either. * RAM and Disk. Also a wash, same 500G drive options available either way. * Video. Same video card, the 17” obviously has much higher resolution * Ports. The 17” has a 3rd USB port (useful) and an expresscard port (yawn). The 15” has an SD card slot (this is way better than expressport). * Battery life. Both claim 8-9 hours. * Price – the 15” will be about $300 less.

All things considered, I am leaning towards the 15”. I’ll miss the bigger display surface but I honestly only really need it occasionally. I’m also thinking that for my most intensive computing work (matlab, aperture) I may want to step up to a full desktop machine anyway and so can get the big screen there.