Should I buy an Apple laptop?

one of the things i love about them is how well they hold their value. will be selling this thing in ~1 yr and will probably lose << £500 on a £1500 purchase. couldn't wait -- can't finish a phd with a smashed screen.

p.s. much love to the UK government for ballbusting apple into offering applecare at 75% off for uk education purchases

Ha, is there a story there? I wondered why I got my Applecare for £notmuch.

hah so I took my mbp apart to replace the thermal grease. I vacuumed out the interior too to remove dust. in the process I think I vacuumed off three tiny resistors near the speaker/mic assembly. punched myself a few times and put it back together and everything seems to be working okay. haven't tried to use any of the things near the sound card/express card area. :>

on the plus side, my macbook is now idling at 47 C where before it was idling at 65 C

oh look they got rid of the enter key and replaced it with another option key. good going.

and it's heavier than i was expecting.

but otherwise this is solid. runs my number crunching code appallingly quickly.

Does anybody have any insight into SSD drive vs., say, 7200rpm hard drive? The SSD adds massively to the cost but I've heard some people say it aids speed dramatically.

lots faster in benchmarking terms, but the practical different depends what you typically use your computer for to a great extent

http://img76.imageshack.us/img76/2446/xbenchx25mzf1.png

I'm gonna wait on SSDs. They keep improving drastically and lowering in price and I don't need one just yet. (and don't have the money). In a year or two I'll either remove my disc drive and replace it with an SSD, or remove my 7200 and put it in an enclosure and put in an SSD.

OWC recently announced some new SSDs:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/internal_storage/Mercury_Extreme_SSD_Sandforce

Claims they're better than Crucial. Don't know about Intel but people were recommending those.

the cost effective way of doing it is using a small SSD for your OS + apps, and a bigger platter drive for your data, but for me that's still to expensive, and the cognitive/backup overhead of having two disks is a pain.

the practical different depends what you typically use your computer for to a great extent

Which patterns of use would benefit from SSD and what wouldn't? I usually have lots of applications and tabs open but don't do a lot of hard-core computation on my laptop (though that might change if the laptop were equal to the task.)

Also: can I swap out the hard drive on a Mac after purchase without voiding the AppleCare? If so, I'm happy to go with regular HD for now and then buy SSD if I feel I need it later.

SSD makes my MacBook Air feel massively faster than the paltry 1.8ghz it is

oh look they got rid of the enter key and replaced it with another option key. good going.
Until they did that I had no idea I used it so much. Bring back enter.

gah so tempted to upgrade after a night of working with RAW files that made my system creak (i have a mbp c2d 2.33ghz with only 2gbs of ram).

might just add another gig of ram for $50 and see if that gives me some more life on this 3-year-old baby. thoughts?

I just successfully transformed my PC into a Hackintosh. On torrents there are various releases (Kalyway, iPC, SnowLeo, etc) that are basically ISOs of patched OSX install DVDs. But it takes a LOT of work to make everything work right. I was hacking away for a solid 4 or 5 days before everything was nice and ready. Now I have OSX 10.5.6 and complete working sound, video, and internet. My usb connections all work, and even the latest release of Final Cut Studio!

I tried at least 3 different releases before one would work for me, iPC OSX86. Some of them would install and then fail to boot, some of them wouldn't even get to the installation. What I ended up doing was backing everything up and formatting a 300GB HD into 2 partitions. One partition I installed Windows 7 and the other was formatted for FAT32. After installing OSX86 I had to do alot of looking around online for the correct video and audio drivers, but now when I start my computer I can select whichever OS I want!

I have a Dell XPS 420 desktop btw.

420

s1ock check your pageins/pageouts in activity monitor. if your number of pageouts is similar to your number of pageins or is a high number, that means you would benefit from adding more RAM. try checking after an editing session with RAWs.

SSDs are good for instant loading of apps & for doing work with files located on the SSD itself, but if you're going to be using in conjunction w/ a regular hard drive, there won't really be a speed increase if all the data files are located on the regular hard drive.

yeah, the biggest different a normal user notices with SSDs are app launching speed, which becomes essentially instant.

unless you are a billionaire you won't be storing video or whatever on them, and they don't help with processor-intensive tasks like video, so they're not so useful for that. they're not useful for the science simulation stuff i do either.

i gather putting your photoshop swapfile on one is a good for PS performance.

I ended up getting the stock 5400rpm drive on my MBP. Instead of paying Apple's hefty drive upgrade prices, I figured I'll swap in a larger 7200rpm drive when prices drop. Pretty sure hard drive swapping doesn't mess with AppleCare.

yeah they mention it in the manual iirc

Let me put it this way -- right now I have a 120GB drive which is almost full (5 GB free) and my machine is very laggy. Let's say I want to choose between having a small SSD which is almost full and a big conventional drive which is much less full. Which will be less annoying?

(xp to mh: yeah, thinking along the same lines -- maybe swap in an ssd when the big ones get cheaper?)

go with the conventional drive - a 120GB SSD would be 3-4x the cost of a 500GB drive (I use a western digital blue label scorpio)

another option is to try one of the new Seagate momentus hybrids...it has a SSD section on the drive that stores all your most-used files.

i was about to buy a new macbook pro (15", 2.4GHz i5) to replace my slightly-falling-apart (literally! in that it's missing screws) powerpc powerbook-- and then my internet connection died just as i was pressing the 'buy' button. and now i am attacked by waves of superstitious fear.

15" mbp is a champ. i literally lolled the first time i saw the battery time remaining.

anyway, anyone tried this? http://onethingwell.org/post/977670277/go-ssd

I haven't used mine much yet (bought it in anticipation of a need that hasn't quite arrived yet) but it seems like the battery time goes quick when it stays on the Nvidia graphics.

hello! i think i should buy a new apple laptop.

i have a macbook, about 6 years old now, i bought it for about £650 iirc. it's not dead yet but it's definitely overly creaky now. the model i have doesn't seem to be on sale any more and all the new ones are confusing me. also someone told me a while ago i should hold out because apple are bringing out a new model? what is the status with this?

i just want a basic laptop that's like the one i have now but not creaky for around the same price :(

you should definitely buy a new laptop

the new ones just got released last week.

they don't make laptops for 650 quid. they never have iirc.

the cheapest current model is the 11" macbook air for 849. that's probably about 700 with a student discount, which you can get if you have a pulse. that's fine for your purposes. a+ recommended.

if you need a disc drive for cds/dvds (lol old) then you'll need to buy an old model second hand or get an external drive. they don't sell them any more.

hang on what laptops don't have cd drives any more? you can't play dvds on them?

but...

I AM CONFUSED

i need to rip CDs to the hard drive all the time! and also i want to watch DVDs on the laptop!

apple don't make laptops with cd/dvd drives since last week.

no one except music journalists and my dad use them any more. you can buy an external one like an external hard drive for < 100£.

i don't know what to do now

http://store.apple.com/uk/product/MD564ZM/A?fnode=MTY1NDA0Nw&s=topSellers

buy an 11" MBA and one of these http://store.apple.com/uk/product/MD564ZM/A?fnode=MTY1NDA0Nw&s=topSellers

so is it just the new models that don't have CD drives? aargh i should have done this the other week

WHY don't they have CD drives? I JUST WANT A LAPTOP THAT IS THE SAME AS THE ONE I HAVE

you can still get the old models refurbished though http://store.apple.com/uk/browse/home/specialdeals/mac they are cheaper and have optical drives. they are repaired ones, but they come with some sort of guarantee

e.g. this would suit you fine http://store.apple.com/uk/product/FD313B/A

also what do people watch if not DVDs these days? i knew CDs were obsolete but i didn't think DVDs were?

people download movies from the internet

the cheapest current model is the 11" macbook air for 849.

is this one of the new ones that just got released last week?

i find everything about this so stressful

people download movies from the internet

i thought that was just illegal torrents though? i tried to work out how to do torrents once and EVERYTHING CRASHED and i've been too frightened to try again since

also there's nowhere enough room on laptops for more than a few films?

yes, all the laptops are new ones that got released last week

you can rent/buy movies using itunes.

a film takes up the same amount of space as 10 albums

and if you rent it you delete it anyway

my current laptop won't even let me watch youtube without skipping or freezing

ok these new models, in what ways are they better than the old ones? like is there something to actually make up for lacking a function i need to use regularly?

they are not creaky