This seems like the right group to consult.

During a recent visit to the genius bar, I learned that the 80G hard drive on my 4-year old macbook no longer has sufficient space to store my ever increasing collection of music and photos (not to mention I will soon be adding movies as well).

I realize there several potential solutions including external hard drive and cloud storage, but I've eliminated those options because I don't want to store photos of my children on someone else's server and I don't want to have to physically link (or even network to) an external drive. And I'm going to stick with Apple, having been abused by Windows for many years. I've considered getting an iPad but the lack of multitasking and a keyboard render it unsatisfactory for the intended usage.

So I've narrowed the choices to:

(1) upgrading current macbook with 500G hard drive = $225 installed incl. files (plus another $100 for a new battery soon), or
(2) purchasing a new macbook air or pro @ $1500-1800 which will free up the current unit for use by my kindergartner.

What would you do?