Be Excellent To Each Other

Hello! My iBook is about 5 years old and feels much older due to Tiger being pretty much obsolete now. I need a laptop for work and so on so I'm getting myself a new one.

I've just enough with the Educational discount to get the bottom of the range MacBook with maybe even a 320Gb drive over the 250Gb standard. This will be like a ferrari to me.

So Should I wait for a line bump? When do the rumours suggest that will be?

And for the fun of it, if you loathe macs, you can try and convince me to spend £750 on a rival laptop. (I'm interested to see the stats difference - the mac will be 2.3Ghz Duo, 320Gb hard drive and some 3D thingy).

I'll hopefully start blogging again when my computer isn't confused and scared all the time. I realised I was keeping it to long when I realised that my PHONE can do most things better than it.

Basically, whenever I spend a lot of money I fret and have to ramble about it, and now I'm infliciting it on you!

I wouldn't worry about the line bumps. You are probably safe for a few months and the bumps these days tend to be tiny. My Macbook is 18 months old and I actually haven't been impressed with the new improvements!

Do remember Apple sell refurb gear via a special secret part of their site.

OOOOOH the refurb store! EXCELLENT! thanks!

As Grim... mentioned I could possibly get an iPad + Desktop instead...

But that would need a total budget of £750 still, and that includes a monitor...

Just a quick peek at an Acer:
Intel Core 2 Duo T6600 2.2GHz
4GB RAM
500GB HDD
18.4" CineCrystal TFT
NVIDIA GeForce GT 240M
Fingerprint Reader
Windows 7 Home Premium

Hmmm, 68 days from the average update date thingy...

Did they change the look of it recently? It looks different to my GFs. And if that was with the last update, it seems to me that there isn't a huge jump in the next update...

And quidco too. You'll lose the educational discount but it'll work out cheaper overall.

Depending on Lave's usage, that's either far superior to the 13" screen Macbook, or much worse.

Wow! But, I probably don't want a screen bigger than 14". I value portability and battery life over brute force. In my silly mac centric ways I've always assumed that PC laptops have terrible batterys.

I'm quite excited that the MacBook battery is quoted as 7 hours for example.

I love my tiny 12" ibook, but can't afford and Mac Air thingy. And I haven't used a DVD drive in months.

I'm depressed that far too tiny netbooks seemed to have undermined the 12" laptop. :(

Late 08: http://apple-history.com/?page=gallery& ... &order=ASC
Early 09: http://apple-history.com/?page=gallery& ... &order=ASC
Mid 09: http://apple-history.com/?page=gallery& ... &order=ASC
Late 09: http://apple-history.com/?page=gallery& ... &order=ASC

That's where I got my iMac several years ago and haven't regretted it.


That's what I'd go for. You should be able to get a decent refurb imac under that price. You're not going to get an ipad for a little while yet so could save up some more for that.

Depends what you need really. I've never been a huge fan of laptops as a main computer, but the macbook *is* shiny...

£872 for a refurb one after Quicdco. Low end specs though.

Bloody hell, i hadn't considered iMac + iPad... thats a really, really good idea......

fuck

Also: Thread justified itself for apple-history site. I miss the Mac that looked like a lamp with a screen that swiviled

Silly Lave.

Recent laptops should have much better battery life than current ones anyway, due to not having a flouescent tube or two to light the screen, along with advances in chip tech. And even then my desktop replacement with tube + 17" screen started with a battery life of about 4 hours.

Hmmm, tempting, but I would rather put that extra £200 towards an iPad (then I would have an iPad/MacBook combo, but still)...

Can't work provide a laptop if you need it for work?

Well, I'm currently working for one place 3 months, then another place 3 months, then possibly a permanent place, but also applying for lots of other jobs - so I need my own laptop really. Applying for jobs is made very tedious at the moment with my dying laptop, and I would rather by one now whilst I have the cash, than in the future if the work dries up.

That and I have to use the windows XP machine here and I'm starting to feel like a snooty mac user.*


* Thats more about wanting to use windows 7 than being properly snooty of course.

#rpdId">http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Dell-XPS-1730-Int ... ad21#rpdId

Bring your games to the slaughter. My mate just made an offer of £635 and it was accepted. That's a fucking SHIT LOAD of laptop for that. 1920 x1200 ultrasharp monitor, Logitech G15 LCD panel etc, etc.

They still sold those until very recently. Same identical spec with a quad core and 9800GT SLI (so the exact same then) for three grand.

What about an iPad and a cheap desktop computer with Win7?

What's actually wrong with your macbook? If it was a windows machine I'd suggest formatting and reinstalling it would solve most problems but it's not usually the case with a mac.

I imagine he just wants something a bit quicker? I've recently been using my Powerbook G4 again to do my Dreamweaver course on and was amazed at just how well it ran after a reinstall, considering it's over 6 years old now. The battery's knackered, but you can get replacements for £30.

Also, I know when I was looking at Macs lately, the current 13" Macbook seemed the way to go. They've slightly changed the look of it too, quite nice it is, if a little plasticky. The 13" Macbook Pro, on the other hand, has an identical spec, except for a smaller HDD and the aluminium body, but for an extra £100. Doesn't really seem worth it to me.

Plus backlit keys, an SDCard reader, and a Firewire port. Nothing earth shattering, admittedly.

Edit -- it's also thinner and lighter, and supports 8Gb RAM (the Macbook is capped at 4Gb). And as an owner of a unibody Macbook, I really like them; they really do feel usefully stronger.

What do you do, hammer nails in with it?

The backlit keys could swing it for me I suppose if I was in the market for one. The Powerbook I mentioned earlier has them, they still work fine and they truly are a wonderful invention.

Whilst I plan to install windows 7 on whatever I get for the novelty of it and to play some of them interesting windows indie games, it will be a *nix that will be my work OS, so OS X or Unbuntu will be main choices.

I'm a gentleman after all. [/unix snob]





I don't really want to reinstall everything, partly because I don't know how useful that is, but mostly because I have a huge amount of astro software installed/written and the PPC -> Intel switch would mean a great deal of work to reaccess the data. I would rather have the iBook sitting around if needed instead.

Though I''m tempted to flog it as they sell for a stupid amount of money. We are talking about £250 for a five year old lap top.

Heh, the whole reason I'd wiped the dust off the Powerbook and reinstalled it was to shove it on eBay. The completely fucked battery put that idea on hold temporarily whilst I had a look at how much a replacement would cost, but I've been surprised at what a relatively decent little machine it still is. The battery also seems to be the only thing wrong with it (it holds no charge whatsoever - reads 99% but if you unplug the mains adaptor, the power goes immediately) and I was concerned the PRAM battery was similarly shagged as it was resetting the date each time I powered it on, but that seems to have stopped now I've been using it a bit.

Anyway, once I can bear to part with it, it'll be worth paying the £30 for a new battery and sticking it on eBay as they seem to fetch anything from £200 - £400 still, which is crackers as it's a 1.25GHz PowerPC G4 laptop that I originally bought new in November 2003!

Aluminium MacBook over the white polycarb one every time, if affordable. That's my advice. I've seen how much physical wear the white MacBooks can get after just 18 months.

The cooling value of alu alone would have me picking that all day tbh. Especially in a laptop.

Laptops can tend to hold their price quite well, often due to unique parts, which are often most easily replaced by bits from old, broken laptops.

i know it makes me come across as snobbish and horrible mac user, but it would depress me ever time I set eyes on that laptop.

So. Very. Ugly.

"Everything should be beautiful, pratical, or both." I'll give it pratical (as long as it gives at least a 4hr battery) but I would rather have something ticking both.

Oh and if we are talking ugly but pratical then this is insane.

http://gizmodo.com/5477571/lenovo-thinkpad-w701ds-pairs-beastly-specs-with-an-integrated-secondary-screen

Ah, the old thinkpads.

Beauties, they are. Built like fucking tanks

Is anyone at a university at the moment? Could you check how cheap the most basic Mac Book (not pro) is via the education store (on the left of the screen via apple.com/uk)

Just ordered a macbook!

Officially the most expensive thing I've ever bought. Egads.

Upgraded the hard drive space to 320Gb, and paid the idiot tax to bump the memory up to 4Gb because 1) installing the upgrade myself last time was horribly stressful, and 2) According to crucial, at the moment 4Gb of ram costs the same as the upgrade. (though I would have had 2Gb to flog on, making it actually much cheaper.).

Feel free to criticise these decisions.

My hand was forced when my iBooks charger threw a wobbly and wouldn't charge my laptop over the weekend.

Well done!

I'd have done the memory myself, like I did. But well done!

Isn't upgrading the ram on all macbooks ridiculously easy? Or are the new unibody ones tougher to get into?

It was a piece of piss to upgrade the RAM on my old Powerbook, but even if things haven't changed, I can understand why you'd maybe want it done for you. It is usually a fabulously expensive way of getting more RAM on a Mac though.

Congrats on your purchase though! I do very much love dem Macs.

Yes.
Also: Yay, new mac!

I should really upgrade my RAM. Getting the spinning umbrella way too often for my liking.

Yes. Really easy. Far easier than my old Acer laptop in fact.

All you need is a decent quality tiny screwdriver. Done in literally 2 minutes.

Congratulations. This now makes you a better person than most of the other posters on here.

Now join me in looking down on the PC owners here.*



* Your first job should be installed a bootcamp partition with the Microsoft operating system of your choice.

Surprisingly decent value compared to how it used to be. Well assuming crucial haven't turned into rip off merchants. Slightly less money than buying from Crucial, but they'll install it for you, and you don't have the old memory to sell.

The unibody ones involve screwing the whole case off, so well within my range of abilities, but the price saved (I'm guessing £20 at best after fees) wasn't worth the 3 hours or so it would take ordering the memory, fighting with the post man to actually deliver it rather than just pretending I wasn't in, going to collect it (+busfair), swapping it over, packing it up, listing it, waiting for it to sell and actually getting down to the post office to post it off.

In otherwords, lazyness.

I've rolled Mac since 2005, Linux since 2002, I'm a gent.


I've surprised myself with how excited I am that I'll have a decent windows machine in with it. Thats why I bought the larger hard drive. I'm going to give over some space for a windows install (maybe even 7?) running steam and indie games and the like.

Its the first time I'll have a windows OS for about 8 years!

How much space should I put down for a windows 7 install, with a bunch of indie games and maybe one or two 'proper' games at any one time. 50Gb enough?

I'd say 50gb should be plenty for that.

I eagerly await the "I have got windows for the first time in ages, tell me all the interesting Windows only games" thread.

I only allocated 22 gig for XP and I have 6 gig of that free. But its not for games, natch.

Hmm, maybe I can drop it to 40Gb then...

And lewiep that thread is incoming, oh boy is it incoming. That indie game with the gold star fish running along for a start.

Boot Camp is excellent IMO. The fact that you can create, delete and resize the partition without having losing data or anything on the OS X partition is incredibly handy. Plus Apple's Windows driver installation couldn't be easier. I'd go as far as to say installing Windows on a Mac is easier than doing it on a PC.

Or buy parallels which is even better!

/choke
/sputter
Go for at least 75Gb. Modern games are huge.
It's not like you don't have a lot of space, is it?