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About to make the switch

L

lathode

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Sep 23, 2007
Messages
1,441
I'm 24, never owned an Apple product. I have an iPhone 3G S coming in a day or two, and now I'm looking at buying a MacBook Pro 13" tonight. From what I've seen online there is no better laptop available. Build quality, battery life, nice specs, etc. I don't have many questions yet but probably will soon. 1 question I have now, is how much RAM is enough? For Windows it seems 4 gigs is the sweet spot (price/performance), Is 2 gigs enough for OS X? Looks pretty easy to upgrade the RAM and HD if it's not enough though.
 
Most people will probably tell you that 2GB is never enough. Unfortunately, I have to disagree. I've never had a problem with 2GB RAM in my iMac 2Ghz, running Leopard 10.5.7, and so far I'm quite pleased with the performance. I've had it a year already, and play games, surf the web, watch videos, and all sorts of other things, and have never been disappointed with the performance. I'd say 2GB RAM is more than enough for most tasks, if you asked me, but that's just my 2 cents worth.
 
I guess it would depend on how many apps you plan on having open at a time. I have 4GB and never slugged. If I were you I would get 4GB anyway but it doesn't hurt to try with 2GB first.
 
Luckily the ram and hard drive are still pretty easy to upgrade if you ever feel either is lacking in performance. You always have the option to start with 2 GB and go larger later on. Personally I'd just go with 4GB and forget about it.

However if you're looking to upgrade your hard drive to a SSD anytime down the line you might want to hold off on the purchase to see how the current issue of SATA 1.5 vs 3.0 unfolds:
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1427265

if you are going to stick with a regular hard drive, then this issue won't affect you.
 
RAM is so cheap right now. It's well worth the $40 to buy a 4GB upgrade from Newegg.
 
I have 4GB standard in all my systems now. Partially because it's so cheap, and because every little bit helps.
 
Sounds good, i'll upgrade to 4 gigs of Crucial. Probably won't go SSD so I'm not too worried about the SATA 1.5.
 
I have the 13" MBP, and can tell you 2GB is plenty, unless you will be running virtual machines. I wanted to run onenote in osx, and ended up using crossover as the VM software just bogged everything down.

The DDR3 4GB kits are currently $60-65 on newegg. I would advise getting it with 2GB, and waiting a little bit until the price of the DDR3 kits comes down a bit. Then you can see if you actually need the 4GB, and it will be cheaper if you do end up wanting it.

I'm a bit of a "leave everything open" kinda guy (itunes, 3xsafari, utorrent, adium, mail, and ical are pretty much always running on my machine) for some frame of reference. You'll see the biggest improvements will be had if you plan to use photoshop, flash, dreamweaver, etc.
 
Good call, for sure don't buy RAM or Hard Drive upgrades from Apple, it is way more expensive that way. I'd suggest getting 4GB, it will help, also remember the video is integrated, so the 256MB they talk about is coming out of your RAM budget, so be careful with comparisons with other Macs. Especially if you are an avid spaces user, like I am, you might have lots of programs running at the same time.
 
Hi. I'm a Mac. 13" MacBook Pro 2.26. Will probably upgrade the hard drive to 500gb WD when Snow Leopard is released as well as 4gb Crucial. So far it's nice, although I have a dead pixel in the middle of my screen. Not a big deal unless I look. So far I've never owned a perfect LCD, whether it's dead/stuck pixels or light bleed.
 
lathode said:
Hi. I'm a Mac. 13" MacBook Pro 2.26. Will probably upgrade the hard drive to 500gb WD when Snow Leopard is released as well as 4gb Crucial. So far it's nice, although I have a dead pixel in the middle of my screen. Not a big deal unless I look. So far I've never owned a perfect LCD, whether it's dead/stuck pixels or light bleed.
Click to expand...

Might wanna take it back and see if they will do anything about it. Might be worth a quick trip to the genius bar if you have one close by.

I'm also a 13" MBP 2.26, but sans dead pixels.
 
Grats on your purchase :) If you haven't already put in a lot of time setting it up and customizing, you could go to where you bought it (assuming not online, then it's not worth the hassle) and just exchange it on the spot for a different one. I've had about 5 LCD displays and none had a dead pixel on them (although this MBP I got has a very tiny crack on the screen that makes it look like a dead pixel. But I had the laptop for 3-4 weeks before I even noticed it so I couldn't exchange it for another one because the 2 week period was up).

Let us know what you think of it!
 
Ive owned mac all my life. Im not a fanboy, because i also run some pretty mean window's machines.

Right now i have a 17" Unibody 2.8GHz Macbook Pro as well as a Quad Core Xeon Pro, and to tell you the truth, their great computers to have, very reliable and well they "just work" BUT SHIT i paid $2,500 for my MBP for not that great of specs. Sure its a great computer and its decent for a laptop, but ohhh the desktop i could have built with that money.

My two cents, if you have the money for a mac.... go for it! Great computers Great OS, but if you feel like building a mean ass desktop.... spend little over half of what the mac is but have 5X the power, do it!
 
Heet said:
Ive owned mac all my life. Im not a fanboy, because i also run some pretty mean window's machines.

Right now i have a 17" Unibody 2.8GHz Macbook Pro as well as a Quad Core Xeon Pro, and to tell you the truth, their great computers to have, very reliable and well they "just work" BUT SHIT i paid $2,500 for my MBP for not that great of specs. Sure its a great computer and its decent for a laptop, but ohhh the desktop i could have built with that money.

My two cents, if you have the money for a mac.... go for it! Great computers Great OS, but if you feel like building a mean ass desktop.... spend little over half of what the mac is but have 5X the power, do it!
Click to expand...
Very true. If only Apple allowed Mac OS to work on PCs :( You could do a hackintosh but I can tell you first hand it's not even worth the hassle which is why I gave up and bought a MBP. Money well spent, though.
 
We opened my girlfriends white macbook when she got it a long time ago and it had a dead pixel, we took it back immediately, i wasn't about to make her deal with that and i wouldn't have either, at the store they recommended we open it in store this time to check everything out.
 
The dead pixel doesn't really bother me anymore, more of a perfectionist thing. After reading about display issues on MacRumors I looked at which screen I had and it was one of the good ones. However sitting next to my Dell 2007FPW the colors looked a little wasked out, I downloaded a color profile from someone on that site and it was a HUGE difference. Much deeper colors. No complaints about the screen now. I'm also loving the multitouch trackpad, it's big and feels good (that's what she said). Also loving the gestures. My iPhone 3G S also came in today and that is soo much better than the Winmo I had. The fonts on this site in Safari look too bold though, well look into that or Firefox. So far so good.
 
Terpfen said:
The one time they tried this it almost killed the company. Not happening.
Click to expand...

Apple released a working generic OSX for x86 machines? Uhmmm... really? I know I did <and was the first, actually... hint, hint> but that's another thread...

If you're speaking of the days when they licensed their OS and their hardware designs, that's a completely different thing altogether. The clones (yes, a wiki link as I don't feel like typing out the history myself) failed because of far more than just Steve Jobs pulling the plug years past.

Until the OSx86 Project got rolling along and I got involved with many other talented folk, there had never been an x86-capable release of any Macintosh OS (outside of Apple itself and the Developer Kit) - unless you count something on the PowerPC platform running on PearPC or some other emulator on a Windows machine (might have been capable on Linux distros also, I have no idea). But it's out there now, and in some instances it works as well as if not better than OSX on a "real Mac" given you can duplicate 99.9% of the hardware in a Mac these days, sometimes at 15x the cost savings, too.

It's a serious question, so treat it as such.

But Apple will never license OSX for any generic PC for two primary reasons:

1) They can't afford it and the cost of the support staff they'd have to hire to handle the incoming requests - it would require them to literally quadruple their staff in a week's time. Their KB would swell in size so much, so fast, even their vaunted X-Servers would come down... :)

2) It would ruin the fabled "Mac stability" because of the sheer infinite variety of hardware people would attempt to install OSX on. Companies have been locked into creating hardware and drivers for Windows for so long, with Linux being basically a nice gesture to keep Linux fanatics happy, but they won't even bother with going that extra step of having to code for a third platform with such tight quality control.

It'll simply never happen.
 
Heet said:
Ive owned mac all my life. Im not a fanboy, because i also run some pretty mean window's machines.

Right now i have a 17" Unibody 2.8GHz Macbook Pro as well as a Quad Core Xeon Pro, and to tell you the truth, their great computers to have, very reliable and well they "just work" BUT SHIT i paid $2,500 for my MBP for not that great of specs. Sure its a great computer and its decent for a laptop, but ohhh the desktop i could have built with that money.

My two cents, if you have the money for a mac.... go for it! Great computers Great OS, but if you feel like building a mean ass desktop.... spend little over half of what the mac is but have 5X the power, do it!
Click to expand...


Apple for laptops, custom built for desktops. It's the only way to go!
 
Joe Average said:
If you're speaking of the days when they licensed their OS and their hardware designs, that's a completely different thing altogether. The clones (yes, a wiki link as I don't feel like typing out the history myself) failed because of far more than just Steve Jobs pulling the plug years past.
Click to expand...

They are not different. Tylerdurdened lamented that Apple never made Mac OS available for use on non-Apple-branded machines. They did, through licensing. It failed dramatically. Whether or not you had to buy a new computer to get that Mac OS license is irrelevant, especially when you consider that most people upgrade their OS not by buying a disc off a shelf but through the purchase of a new computer with that OS pre-loaded.

It'll simply never happen.
Click to expand...

Indeed, but not for the "reasons" you list. It won't happen simply because there is no business incentive for Apple to do so. They're not desperate for revenue, nor does their business model doesn't demand top spot market share to maintain profitability, particularly with Mac sales at all-time highs. There's just no need.
 
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