Apple Macbook ... take the plunge?

[noisedude]

I'm fed up with Windows and I'm fed up with my ancient laptop that I can't even watch DVDs on. So it's time for a change. What do people think around here, find a nice little Acer or HP and put Linux on it, or cross to the other side and Mac it up?

The entry-level Macbook is decent enough nowadays and because it's all proprietary, you know the extras will work properly, like the camera and remote and so on.

I'm a little bit nervous though, not sure if I'm ready to learn a whole new OS.

[boingoman]

Buy a Mac and put Windows on it.

[noisedude]

How easy is it to do that? Do you install it straight on there, or run it in some sort of virtual PC thing?

[Hard2Hear]

You need an installer from Apple with Windows drivers and a partition utility, but its pretty easy. I put XP Pro on a MacPro and it was faster than putting it on most PCs. Seems to work great and benchmarks really well for audio.

[noisedude]

Originally Posted by Hard2Hear

You need an installer from Apple with Windows drivers and a partition utility, but its pretty easy. I put XP Pro on a MacPro and it was faster than putting it on most PCs. Seems to work great and benchmarks really well for audio.

Then it's decided.

Where do I get that installer from?

[boingoman]

The most common solution I've heard of is Parallels software. My brother in law runs it on his machine, he's a web designer and can't reboot every time he wants to check a site. I have a bunch of game sinstalled on his, since I no longer own a PC. They work fine. There are some caveats, which they list on their site. I like it when companies actually tell you what their products won't do.

ps- OSX is pretty simple to use, if a bit frustrating at times.

Sorry it took awhile to respond, this place makes me nervous, like I'll be kicked out if I fart.

[dwillis45]

Just don't expect to life the perfect i-life where nothing ever goes wrong and nothing breaks. The Macbook has a history of issues, including random shutdowns. The power supply is vulnerable to wear despite the fact that it's a "tear away" design. The built-in mouse pad may also wear out prematurely. And don't drop the computer. As Apple says, it's a notebook not a laptop. The Macbook is very light but also very delicate.

You may expect fewer addware/spyware problems. But one of these days all this crap is going to catch up to Apple. And remember that while the computer will not typically crash, some programs will. Apple calls this "unexpectedly quitting," so get used to seeing the message.

[muttley600]

Originally Posted by dwillis45

And don't drop the computer. As Apple says, it's a notebook not a laptop. The Macbook is very light but also very delicate.

That maybe true but a little story for you.

My Dad had an G4 back a few years ago. He went off to Spain for a weeks golf with Mum. Half way through the week I get a call from the Fire Brigade. their house, at least the top floor has been gutted in a fire. I rush off to inspect the damage and sure enough the place is gutted. On top of the charred remains of his desk is a very badly burnt Powerbook G4. It's been in a serious fire and then been soaked by the resulting flood of fire hoses. The damage to the house took a year to put right. I took the powerbook home got a new power cable and it booted first time.

I've used Mac in the past and it's OK, not cheaper to run than PC and has as it's failings but for many it's the way to go.

[boingoman]

Didn't get dropped, it doesn't count.

[muttley600]

Hang on I'll just tip it down the stairs. Purely in the interest of research you understand..............









..................Damn now its not working

[dwillis45]

Don't get me wrong. I've been a Mac user since the 80s and I've never used Windows. But Macs have issues just like any other computer. I can't speak to the Powerbook, but I've been through multiple i-books and macbooks and they're not exactly rough and tumble. Plus, you have to be very careful with the power cord or it will fly up your nose.

[dgatwood]

Originally Posted by dwillis45

Just don't expect to life the perfect i-life where nothing ever goes wrong and nothing breaks. The Macbook has a history of issues, including random shutdowns. The power supply is vulnerable to wear despite the fact that it's a "tear away" design. The built-in mouse pad may also wear out prematurely. And don't drop the computer. As Apple says, it's a notebook not a laptop. The Macbook is very light but also very delicate.

That sounds like the first revision of the MacBook hardware. The current models are much improved. The power supply cable was redesigned to fix the fraying problem (and the adapters can be exchanged for free if they fail), and according to comments by repair techs, the heat sink was also redesigned to fix the thermal shutdown problem. All those were problems specific to the very first (Core Duo) model of MacBook.

P.S. You shouldn't drop any laptop.... LCDs don't like that.

[aidan_m]

Well I'm a newbie to the MAC got a MBP off santa last year after being a good boy!

I've so far (fingers crossed) only had initial crashes when trying use firewire 800 external hdd at the same time as pro tools m-powered. Contacted digidesign and they told me run hdd out of firewire 400 port and solved the prob. This is the only crash I've had and I run PT projects with a load of plugins and tracks..

Just my 2 bits.

[cusebassman]

I've had my G4 powerBook 17" for three years now, and I've dropped it once clear on an edge against pavement - the case dented, and the rest of the machine was fine. Eventually the wireless card died, and the only reason the hard drive went was because someone slammed a pile of books down on the desk I was sitting at at the time, and the hard drive clicked, and the machine died.

But, I haven't had experience with the MacBooks - I think I am going to splurge for a tower instead next time. As for the OS, it works very well, but as dwill says, it isn't perfect - the only thing I like about it is the fact that when most any app crashes, you can just switch to Finder, and end the process - whereas even to this day with Windows, certain applications will bring the entire OS down. It isn't quite as bad as back in the 9x days where opening one too many web browsers would blue screen the machine and you'd lose that sweet game of Chip's Challenege you were on level 98 of , but it still happens.

[dwillis45]

Originally Posted by dgatwood

That sounds like the first revision of the MacBook hardware. The current models are much improved. The power supply cable was redesigned to fix the fraying problem (and the adapters can be exchanged for free if they fail), and according to comments by repair techs, the heat sink was also redesigned to fix the thermal shutdown problem. All those were problems specific to the very first (Core Duo) model of MacBook.

P.S. You shouldn't drop any laptop.... LCDs don't like that.

That's why it's a good idea not to buy the first generation of any newly designed Apple. It seems they always have problems. Of course, the good thing about Apple is that they are pretty decent about repairing issues. That applies to the i-book power cable and the macbook power cable--both of which have a history of failing. It also applies to the shutdown problem in the macbook, the logic board failures in the old G4 i-books, the melting capacitors in the second generation i-mac G5, the fan issue in the first i-mac G5s, the defective DVD drive in the second generation i-mac, and the mouse pad issues in the first macbooks.

Like I said above, I'm a long time Apple user. But Macs do break. The good news is that Apple usually fixes their mistakes and it's usually fast, friendly, and free--even out of warranty. The bad news is that hardware issues appear to be occurring with greater frequency. IMHO, Apple's design innovations are somewhat ahead of their quality control.

[Hard2Hear]

Originally Posted by noisedude

Then it's decided.

Where do I get that installer from?

http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/

[noisedude]

Interesting stuff, thanks guys. I'm waiting on an insurance payout and then I think I'm just going to go for it.

The cheapest one seems to make sense .... I'm not going to pay an extra £130 ($260) just for an extra 40gb hard disk and a DVD writer. All of my stuff is on external drives and network resources anyway, and almost always just burn CDs anyway.

Boot Camp looks quite straightforward, but I am tempted to get hold of Parallels and run them as virtual machines instead ....

[dwillis45]

Originally Posted by noisedude

The cheapest one seems to make sense .... I'm not going to pay an extra £130 ($260) just for an extra 40gb hard disk and a DVD writer. All of my stuff is on external drives and network resources anyway, and almost always just burn CDs anyway.

The Superdrive (DVD burner) is a nice addition if you ever do video with i-movie or plan to use i-dvd to author DVDs.

[boingoman]

Originally Posted by dwillis45

IMHO, Apple's design innovations are somewhat ahead of their quality control.

But perfectly in line with planned obsolescence theory!!

[dwillis45]

Originally Posted by boingoman

But perfectly in line with planned obsolescence theory!!

Yeah, they've got that one down to a fine art.

[dgatwood]

Originally Posted by dwillis45

That's why it's a good idea not to buy the first generation of any newly designed Apple. It seems they always have problems. Of course, the good thing about Apple is that they are pretty decent about repairing issues. That applies to the i-book power cable and the macbook power cable--both of which have a history of failing. It also applies to the shutdown problem in the macbook, the logic board failures in the old G4 i-books, the melting capacitors in the second generation i-mac G5, the fan issue in the first i-mac G5s, the defective DVD drive in the second generation i-mac, and the mouse pad issues in the first macbooks.

The logic board failures were with basically the entire run of white iBooks except for the first generation. Bad example.

The capacitors weren't technically Apple's fault. Apple doesn't make the capacitors.... Ditto with the DVD drives. Now if you had said the early TiBook optical drive (case flex issue), then you'd have a point....

[SRR]

I bought a 17" widescreen Acer for $599, 2 cores, 2Ghz, 1gig of Ram, vista home premium...macs are very pricey, unless you are talking mac and cheese or even big macs. But computer macs, just to run bootcamp?? And OSX? Let me go throw up, get the camera baby Gorty is gonna want a picture of this.

[cusebassman]

Originally Posted by noisedude

Interesting stuff, thanks guys. I'm waiting on an insurance payout and then I think I'm just going to go for it.

The cheapest one seems to make sense .... I'm not going to pay an extra £130 ($260) just for an extra 40gb hard disk and a DVD writer. All of my stuff is on external drives and network resources anyway, and almost always just burn CDs anyway.

Boot Camp looks quite straightforward, but I am tempted to get hold of Parallels and run them as virtual machines instead ....

I haven't done any research on Parallels, but if it is going to be running Windows on a virtual machine within OS X, go with bootcamp - bootcamp sets the machine up (AFAIK) to run Windows on the native hardware, just like it would if it were the main OS on any computer. Running it in a virtual machine within another operating system is usually much, much slower.

[Hard2Hear]

exactly. just like running windows on quality PC hardware. I did benchmarks for Nuendo and Sonar in Bootcamp and it had very good numbers. In fact, slightly better than a PC with the same processor setup. Pesky bios.

And a $599 notebook is not going to have near the quality of the components that are in a MacBookPro. If you look at the high end PC notebooks made with quality components, they're in line with the cost of Macs. You pay more for good components. And Pro Audio is very demanding of and sensitive to those components. See if you can run Ivory or EWQL Gold at a 64 buffer on a $599 Dell or HP.

[jjones1700]

If you are concerned about hardware durability, you will be stuck with Windoze on either a Thinkpad (Lenovo.......formerly IBMs product line) or a Panasonic Toughbook. As far as linux vs. Mac vs. Windoze.........linux and Mac are pretty similar under the hood, just the GUI is all foo-foo'd up on the Mac. Linux doesn't have all of the cool audio software that Macs and Windoze has. Sure, you have Audacity and Reaper for linux, but if you rely on Pro-Tools...........kiss it goodbye. I haven't really read or had the chance to play with the new generation of Intel based Macs to see if they still have the multimedia advantage still. Windoze.............well.............it's just Windoze...............everyone knows what to expect.