Why a macbook is a good investment.

Cycrow

John_Gray wrote: »

Really? And why not Mint Cinnamon?

im using Mint Cinnamon on my laptop
new version of ubuntu are just full of bloat

prowla

I got into using Ubuntu and am comfortable there.
But I'll give Mint Cinnamon a go too...

(I use Red Hat, Oracle and CentOS in my work, along with a smattering of SuSE, but I don't fancy them as my desktop.)

LouLou

I suppose if build quality is an issue (re PCs) you could always spring for a business grade laptop.

I got a Lenovo X200 (admittedly used, but in absolutely fantastic condition) for £95 recently. Those laptops are built to last and very easy to maintain too.

thescouselander

I'm not sure why people think Macs are more expensive than PCs. Yes, you can get more RAM and processor for less money but if you want something with the equivalent build quality and other features like light up keyboards, long battery life and high resolution screens etc you're going to be investing in the higher end of the PC market where the prices aren't that different to Apple.

Personally I have no axe to grind. I use both PCs and Macs and each has their advantages and disadvantages. People should just buy whatever meets their requirements best.

gonzo127

thescouselander

gonzo127 wrote: »

Good point!

:rotfl:

JasX

Yes Batman but why not

Personally I'm against most of the above.

If I want to do something that needs a lot if processing power I'll use my self-built and piecemeal upgraded desktop at home -> nice big monitor, over the years has had an SSD and Blu-ray drive dropped in when reasonably priced ones came on the market. It already has a good number of components re-used/re-cycled from my 2005 PC. If ever I feel the i7-950 processor is getting a bit old I'll buy a mobo, processor, ram bundle to drop in and decide if I need to up the graphics card then or can wait a bit.

Laptops I generally regard as a difficult to upgrade/repair waste of money... If I need to work on the go I'll use a nice cheap one that can cope with word processing/excel/email and play a DVD. Gaming-wise I'll save those quirky cheap indie games that need next to no processing power I scooped up for about £1 each during steam sales or humble bundle offers for gaming on the go too. The heavy 3d stuff I'll stick to at home.

Finally a lot of the time I'll just have my google nexus tablet on me for essential browsing when I don't want even a laptop in tow (eg on holiday/a city break for checking out local restaurants and attraction information)

My summary view-> Expensive laptops/MacBooks are both generally a waste of money

LouLou

gonzo127 wrote: »

Yeah, it came up when I was looking for something else. The OP is just trying to poke people with a pointy stick, I suspect.

It worked:rotfl:

Weird_Nev

I just got a new Dell INspiron 7000 series - it was about £700 so mid range.
It has an aluminium chassis, gorilla glass touch screen, i7ULV processor, 8Gb Ram and 1Tb HDD, Nvidia GT750m GFX, backlit keyboard... it feels very much a 'premium' product, so 'PC' manufacturers are catching up.

It's not as slick out of the box as an Apple product, but then it's half the price!

I do feel this is a moot point. People are clearly willing to pay 'extra' for Apple products, they demonstrate this across their product range. You pay for the integrated hardware/software, the UI design, the product design, for bricks and mortar shops and face to face customer service (which has not been brilliant in respect of me trying to get a 13 month old faulty iPhone 4S fixed)....

These are just the decisions some people make, and they are justified because they clearly see value in them. I don't think you need to financially justify buying a Macbook Air - it's not that kind of decision. If you need a particular specification, there are cheaper ways to get it. If you Want a macbook air, then buy one.

The financial argument for opting for Apple products is not strong, but they're the kind of thing I'd give as a gift rather than treating as a tool. That adds significant value.

securityguy

One handy thing Apple have done recently is the way they've developed the Fusion Drive for high-end (on their price list, at least) systems. Fusion's a combination of an SSD (typically 128GB) and a hard drive (a 1TB 2.5" in Mac Minis and smaller iMacs, a 3TB 3.5" in larger iMacs), with software support in CoreStorage to do tiered storage. So data you use regularly ends up on the SSD and data you use less regularly on the HD; better, all writes go to the SSD, and are staged out to disk as soon as possible. You get the full capacity, not that it really matters (ie, 128GB + 1TB = 1.1TB) and most of the performance of having a 1TB SSD (which is insanely expensive).

It so happens that the software is all in Mavericks, so you hook an SSD and an HD to your old Mac, you can rebuild it with a Fusion Drive. The OS has to know that the SSD is an SSD, which means (although there are ways around this if you're very brave) it needs to be on an internal connector, and for the performance to be sensible you probably want the HD on an internal connector as well. The obvious way to do it (iMac, MacBook Pro) is to put the SSD in the internal hard drive bay, and replace the DVD drive with a hard drive in an appropriate caddy. A lot of older Macs use PATA for the DVD, so it makes more sense to put the hard drive there, where it will be slightly bottlenecked, and get the full 3GB/sec meaty goodness for the SSD, where it matters.

I've just completed this work on a 2007 iMac, and it's transformational: the machine's faster and more responsive than it was new (as you'd expect) and perfectly comparable with my recent Air for anything that isn't totally CPU bound; even then, the machine has a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo in it, which is hardly underpowered for typical use. I'm hoping that this work will let me get ten years out of the machine, which seems a good for the money.

There's no particular reason to believe it won't run 10.10. If it doesn't, the component that's likely to kill it is the ATI Radeon 2600 graphics card which wasn't used in many other Apple products; it was the Intel GMA onboard graphics that were only used on that model that probably led to the early de-supporting of the 2007 Mac Minis. In which case, there are sometimes ways to take the graphics support from release n to release n+1, or otherwise it'll be a release behind for the last few years of its useful life. Given I bought it with 10.4 Tiger, I don't think I can complain really.

I had the 128GB SSD lying around from another project, so in direct cash terms the job cost me about eighty quid (two caddies and a 1TB laptop drive). Had I bought the SSD it would have cost about £150 (a 128GB Samsung EVO Basic SSD is about seventy). If you're doing the job on a Macbook you can obviously use the laptop's existing drive, so it'll cost the SSD plus one caddy, or about £80. Pretty good value upgrade.