Everything Apple (the Mac heads thread)

I've a Macbook and I love it. I can make films, record music, write essays on Thomas Hobbes.. it's perfect for a college student I think.

Wouldn't say no to a Pro, though..

The others are right, too, black is the way to go. The white ones only end up looking filthy.

Good thread, especially as I'm currently wrestling with exactly the same situation.

Apart from the difference in colour of the case the other subjective thing that might be a sticking point is that the pro has a matt screen surface and the book has a glossy one. Sounds silly, but I hate the glossy, mind you do I hate it £500 hmmmmm.

I have a McBook Pro, and t'missus has a McBook (of the clan McBook!).

The smaller size is really nice, and the magnetic screen clasp is great (The clasp on my G4 powerbook gave out after a couple of years, and it's the same design on the McBook Pro)

On the other hand, the McBook Pro is noticably faster, has an ExpressCard slot (which I use for 3G), a much nicer keyboard and a standard DVI-out.

If you don't need the Pro stuff, the ordinary should suit you fine.

had a macbook for a year no, and love it...

macbook is the best choice, as you assumed macbook pro is overkill, they are rarely ever used to their full potential

i've got the macbook pro for work/uni course, but if your just going to be using word etc then just use macbook, it'll be more then capable for everything, infact it'll be more then capable probably, there lovely little computers

+1 for the regular macbook. ram it full of, well, ram, and it does everything fine.
the only issue is with the edging on the plastic casing which is prone to the odd crack if even vaguely mistreated.
And I'm not the only one who's noticed that.

for what you do even a macbook is overkill :)

what a lot of people don't notice apart from the video card is the architecture, the bus on the pro is faster than the macbook so with the same processor and the same amount of RAM you'll still have quite a lot of performance advantage. that was the same kind of difference between the imac g5 and the powermac g5 back then.

the pro's got much better build quality too. the aluminium casing can really take one hell of a beating that plastic can only dream of.

Thanks all, very helpful.

Build Buy it now, only if you really need it - The mac books are approaching the end of a cycle. So a refresh is likely in Jan. If it were me I would wait. There is also a very high likelihood of an ultra-portable MacBook at Macworld San Francisco Jan 08.

Yeah, I'm vaguely aware of this. However, they could change for the worse (from my point of view). For example, I'm not a widescreen fan - web pages, word documents and spreadsheets, huge pdfs from scientific articles aren't wide, so the change of iBook --> MacBook was slightly disappointing in that respect.

MrSmith i have a macbook, one of the first ones 2gb ram. it runs a 20 external monitor with no problems. i use mine for batch processing raw files and for shooting tethered with a digital back. it's as fast as my g5 with 4gb of ram. i couldn't see the point of getting a pro as i don't need the card slot.

ok, cheers. That's the kind of comparison I was after!

the g4's are ponderously slow compared to intels, you will not be disappointed.

Hmm the one thing that is holding me back from upgrading my iBook is that I don't even find it slow. I love using my iBook, but what makes me want to upgrade is that I don't want to leave it any longer otherwise the value of it is going to plummet even more. Edit: Plus everything is going to intel, don't want to be left behind in terms of universal/intel/ppc binaries.

addie +1 for the regular macbook. ram it full of, well, ram, and it does everything fine.
the only issue is with the edging on the plastic casing which is prone to the odd crack if even vaguely mistreated.
And I'm not the only one who's noticed that.

Yeah, I wouldn't go for anything less than 1GB, almost certainly go for 2GB. Ram makes a huge difference - one of my friends had a PowerMac G5 with only 512MB ram (it was a refurb) but it was ridiculously slow - my iBook G4 was running multiple apps way faster with 1GB.

and with OS X's virtual memory system you can really kill your hard drive with not enough ram.

I had exactly this dilemma about a month ago. There is a £400 difference, and for that extra £400 you don't really get a lot of better hardware (just a better graphics card), BUT you also get 2 more inches of screen and its made of alluminum! It looks hot and has a larger screen, win win win. Macbooks are still also only 1st gen, so there are still a lot of issues (2 of my friends the plastic has cracked off the edge just from use, it gets scratched easily, his screen won't stop fickering and there is a lump protruding from the front of one).

So I went for the MBP. If you have the spare money, invest it.

Only thing is, now, I'd wait til the expo in January, they may update it. The MBP/Powerbook design has been around for about 6 years, and with all this touch screen they're implementing into everything else, you never know...

macbook unless need raw graphics power (gaming, video editing). macbook is perfect price point - i use one commercially for web and print. just buy 4GB ram from crucial.com (~£100) and you'll be laughing

also, DONT get sucked in with the pro bullshit, or the "if youre going to be doing word processing" palava. the macbooks are screamingly fast. think something like a tower from a year or two ago. you can definitely work on 100MB photoshop files, edit video etc without too much of a problem

*difference in price is *

£700 for macbook 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (combo drive)
£1300 for macbook pro 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (superdrive)

for £600 extra you get to burn DVDs, get an extra 1GB stick of ram (worth about £15), and more screen real estate, as well as the graphics card bump (though you'll have to spend another £300 to get the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics with 256MB SDRAM)

ok, it's definitely down to a macbook rather than a pro.

I was going to upgrade to 2gb ram, not 4gb - that's total overkill for me! I was looking a crucial a moment ago, £35 for 2x1gb, which is a bargain compared to apple who want ~ £75!

It's simply a case now of which Macbook. Not the black one, I prefer the white.

I've got an 80gb hdd now. I have 45.5gb free. I don't have a proper digital camera, only my SE cybershot phone, but I do have reasonable cd collection, about 2000 songs and grows quite steadily. I don't have a camcorder.

I rarely use my cd-rw, so I doubt i'd use a dvd writer. I doubt I'd use it for back up, use a external hard drive instead.
2.0ghz or 2.2ghz? Again, I doubt I'd even notice the difference.

Hmmm:

1GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM - 2x512MB
80GB Serial ATA drive (5400rpm)
Keyboard (English) & Mac OS (English)
EMEA CC-HE contract uplift MacBook/iBook
2.0GHz Intel Core Duo
Combo Drive
AirPort Extreme Card & Bluetooth
Power Adapter
Battery

£648.60 with student pricing. Plus £35 for memory from Crucial.

i would go the bottom end model (the one i think you picked). its perfectly fine (i have one). if you need more space, get an external [ame=http://www.amazon.co.uk/LaCie-Desktop-Design-Porsche-7200RPM/dp/B000GIXVZW/]lacie 500GB drive[/ame] for ~£70. good for Time Machine and all your goodies

one thing you might consider is applecare. you dont need to buy it right away, but it is handy on laptops. i have had to use mine twice. my drive stopped working recently with and old machine and i got it swapped out for a brand new one. saved me hassle and ££

don't bother getting a usb only drive for backing up a mac. if you get a firewire one you can use a copy of superduper to make a bootable clone of your hardrive. if you main drive fails you can start up from the external drive, something you can't do with usb.

Yeah, that's what I was planning on doing. USB is slow compared to firewire, especially if you've got a hub connected like me.

Time to look at my bank account and do some sums...

If you're a student, get the student AppleCare when you buy it! £50 as opposed to £300. Makes it worth so much more if you sell it.

USB2 = FW on speed (though i prefer firewire for MrSmith's reasoning). firewire are usually more expensive though

MrSmith don't bother getting a usb only drive for backing up a mac. if you get a firewire one you can use a copy of superduper to make a bootable clone of your hardrive. if you main drive fails you can start up from the external drive, something you can't do with usb.

Do macs not have a boot from usb option in the bios? I thought all modern computers had this.

You can create a direct copy of your harddrive by creating a partition on a external hard drive the smae size as your internal hard drive and then use dd to mirror the hard drive. The as long as you can chhose boot from usb from the bios you can boot form the usb hard drive. If you can't boot from usb you could just put a copy of grub on a cd then boot from cd and then have grub point to the usb drive. This makes it a little more complicated but if there is a big price differential it is worth it. I would expect though that there would be a boot from usb option some where.

hardhat USB2 = FW on speed (though i prefer firewire for MrSmith's reasoning). firewire are usually more expensive though

FW400 is way more robust and is in reality faster than USB2. 480 is the max for USB2 vs 400 for FW400 but it's not about the peak, it's about average transfer rate. and don't forget there's FW800.

professional grade audio interfaces only come in firewire and not usb. that says something.

you can't boot from a usb drive it has to be firewire.
superduper does lots of other clever stuff without having to learn what 'bios' and 'grub' mean it only costs $20 and is worth every penny.

I think that with computers you should buy the best you can afford regardless of its suitability. I got a Macbook pro the first day they came out and have not been disappointed. The keyboard on the Macbook annoys me. It looks cheap.

i completely agree vinz, but the difference between 700 and 1300 is huge, and you dont always need to buy a £1300 machine just because you can.

Yeah, £600 = 10 weeks living costs, excl. rent for me.