Everything Apple (the Mac heads thread)

So what i'm saying is if he/she has a Macbook Pro with half a gig of graphics card memory then the 30 inch should be no problem and is a ridiculous amount of screen space....you still haven't said what this is all needed for though?

Arrrgghhh I agree - mine is not to reason why! Mine is to buy something that works for this guy! Eek!!

Fucking hell that magma thing is expensive..... for that price i would just buy the biggest single monitor you can.... this should be big enough! http://accessories.euro.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=uk&l=en&s=dhs&cs=ukdhs1&sku=170559

If you're going to drop that kind of cash on a monitor then get an Eizo, much better.

Arrrgghhh I agree - mine is not to reason why! Mine is to buy something that works for this guy! Eek!!

What he's asking is retarded, he just accept he has made a mistake, take back the monitors and do it properly, instead of having some ridiculous fucking set-up all over his desk.
What is this guy using all this stuff for?

OK I gotta buy a Macbook Pro 13" today for this guy with

Office 2008 for Mac
Time Capsule 1Tb (for backup and wireless LAN)
Windows emulation software (so I can load and run PC programs such as Memory Map, Adobe Writer, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Mindjet, Freehand) without need to reboot.
4Gb RAM and 320Gb disk (only £40 more)
2.53 GHz
Ideally I'd like to have an external wireless keyboard and wireless mouse with port replication (so I can plug sound system into that)
with ability to use my existing twin Dell 20" flatscreen monitors.

he wants to run Geological applications sigh

Jebus, why won't he have a PC dammit!!

OK I gotta buy a Macbook Pro 13" today for this guy with

Office 2008 for Mac
Time Capsule 1Tb (for backup and wireless LAN)
Windows emulation software (so I can load and run PC programs such as Memory Map, Adobe Writer, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Mindjet, Freehand) without need to reboot.
4Gb RAM and 320Gb disk (only £40 more)
2.53 GHz
Ideally I'd like to have an external wireless keyboard and wireless mouse with port replication (so I can plug sound system into that)
with ability to use my existing twin Dell 20" flatscreen monitors.

he wants to run Geological applications sigh

Jebus, why won't he have a PC dammit!!

Retarded, if he got a 15 inch and a 1900 x 1200 24-27 inch monitor of some kind it would give him more screen Real Estate than the "perfect set-up" he has in mind, take up less desk space, and probably cost him less money!

soul gave the right answer, matrox products are what you want

Something like this would work: http://www.dabs.com/products/matrox-dualhead2go-digital-usb-powered-4XN8.html

This is probably the winner, cheers

FML

Eightball I do not envy you having to deal with retards of such a grand proportion,
I hope you managed to reach some kind of resolution with this Div!

I know there's a few people on here that work in the creative industries and that use Apple Mac's. I'm about to purchase a replacement for my old MacBook Pro and been considering the Solid State options.
Reviews are all well and good, but I'd like to hear from anyone who is, or has been using a new Macbook Pro with Solid State, and if there's noticeable Pro's and Cons for it compared with the 7200rpm Disk drives.

Cheers in advance for your time

b

Pro: It's fast has no moving parts so uses less power and is more durable.
Cons: It's expensive, moreso if you buy from Apple.

I would just buy a Mac with a Sata Hard Drive then maybe upgrade the drive once prices come down to a sensible level that is unless you have more money then sense or are self employed and can write it off against tax.

Hippy, cheers fella! have you been using the solid state drives yourself? what kinda stuff you been using them for? does it improve your work flow noticeably?
I'm curious to the practicalities and function, compared with the hard disk. Longer battery would be great....but is it noticeably better? I an handle waiting a split second for disk start up. Less heat generated would be good, my current/last one use to get hot as hell.
Agreed, it seems expensive at the minute (it's early-ish days i s'pose) so i expect a week after i buy one, it will cost half as much for twice the capacity.

sorry for all the questions, im just curious as to its worth in a laptop for the price.

thanks.

From what the guy said in the Apple store who has one start up and shut down speeds are a lot better.

What is the price difference and how much would a 250gb drive cost?

I would just buy a Mac with a Sata Hard Drive then maybe upgrade the drive once prices come down to a sensible level that is unless you have more money then sense or are self employed and can write it off against tax.

Sounds sensible at this point in time, cheers. I am self employed though...
It's good to hear opinions that aren't dictated by sponsorship or hand outs.

From what the guy said in the Apple store who has one start up and shut down speeds are a lot better.

What is the price difference and how much would a 250gb drive cost?

Depends on model, 15" from £135 - 240 just for 128gb

£441-550 for 256gb!! that's added extra and with educational discount!!! seems alot...

It results in a performance increase everywhere and is apparently "well worth it" when you compare an equivalent cost for upgrading a CPU, etc.

With that said, I'd check to see if your current read/write speeds are being tasked by the apps/workflow you use (use Activity Monitor or similar), if you're constantly maxing out then you'll really notice the upgrade, etc.

Depends on model, 15" from £135 - 240 just for 128gb

At that price per gb I couldn't justify the upgrade unless I had money to burn and would upgrade it to a larger drive in a years time.

Once you can buy a 300 gb drive for under £100 then I may well replace my 250 gb sata.

Do you know any Uni students as they could get you a 14% discount on a Mac so that may make it worthwhile to purchase a standard one then use the savings to get a ssd as I don't believe to discount applies to special orders, I may be wrong though.

∆∆∆ just edited the details for 256gb in the previous post. I work for a university so that's the discounted costs.

At those prices I wouldn't bother at the moment, go to crucial and whack in more ram for the time being.

Hippy, cheers fella! have you been using the solid state drives yourself? what kinda stuff you been using them for? does it improve your work flow noticeably?
I'm curious to the practicalities and function, compared with the hard disk. Longer battery would be great....but is it noticeably better? I an handle waiting a split second for disk start up. Less heat generated would be good, my current/last one use to get hot as hell.
Agreed, it seems expensive at the minute (it's early-ish days i s'pose) so i expect a week after i buy one, it will cost half as much for twice the capacity.
sorry for all the questions, im just curious as to its worth in a laptop for the price.
thanks.

I don't use one myself but we are speccing new development machines so just did a bit of research with 10k versus SSD drives. I am definitely getting an SSD for my laptop or as the boot drive in a home desktop machine.
They are appealing for people moving around with laptops a lot since there's far less risk of data loss due to movement/drops/etc. The power consumption is significantly less than a 10k drive and I'm sure the heat is far less too. But cost is the major negative. Since you can only usually get one drive in a laptop and you'd want a sizeable drive 100gb+ you are looking at £500 for a drive that in SATA format would cost £50 or 10k maybe £150. For me, I want the speed so I am definitely getting one.. fuck the cost.
You might have a hard time justifying it to your boss though.
If you've only got a 5400rpm drive then moving to 7200 or 10k will be a nice boost.

It results in a performance increase everywhere and is apparently "well worth it" when you compare an equivalent cost for upgrading a CPU, etc.
With that said, I'd check to see if your current read/write speeds are being tasked by the apps/workflow you use (use Activity Monitor or similar), if you're constantly maxing out then you'll really notice the upgrade, etc.

Good point. Different users will notice different levels of benefits.
It should make all booting ops faster - anywhere there's data being read from teh drive.
For me, Visual Studio is a massive whore for drive access. It does lots of background operations that just don't happen in the background on a slow machine. With an SSD drive generating designer files or background compilation and other stuff will all be sped up versus my current 7200 drive. The more disk use the more the benefits. If you have 32gb of ram you might notice less benefit. If you do lots of audio recording you might notice less benfit (SSD performs on par or possibly slower than 10k Velociraptor drive when doing some forms of writing).

At those prices I wouldn't bother at the moment, go to crucial and whack in more ram for the time being.

Yeah, RAM is usually your best upgrade. I've already maxed mine out so SSD is where it's at! We ended up going for 10k drives in the work machines due to costs but after xmas I'll be deciding whether to keep my laptop and SSD it or build a desktop and SSD boot drive that. Schweeet..

Sounds like bollocks to me. MTBF was something like 1,000,000 hours which sounds like a truckload more than a spinny type drive but you'd have to check.

Sounds like bollocks to me. MTBF was something like 1,000,000 hours which sounds like a truckload more than a spinny type drive but you'd have to check.

Don't use a SSD drive on a PC that you use to post on here as that MTBF rate will be about 3 months for you ;p