looking for advice for decision on laptop

[R3d]

Hey all,

long story short... looking for a new laptop for mostly video/photo editing and day to day stuff. I haven't used OSX all that much but i'm not afraid to go that route and can also get windows installed on the MB if i wanted to. I'm looking for any info/reviews for owners of either or ideally, but anything helps. Love the idea of the higher res from the retina, but only the dual core vs quad has be wondering about the performance difference and i don't know if i want to go for the 15" MBr.

Alienware M14x or a Macbook Retina 13"

AW specs - CDN $1650 +taxes and such
PROCESSOR 3rd generation Intel® Core™ i7-3630QM processor (6MB Cache, up to 3.4GHz w/Turbo Boost 2.0)
OPERATING SYSTEM Windows® 7 Professional, 64bit
MEMORY 12GB (1 X 4GB, 1 X 8GB) DDR3 at 1600MHz
VIDEO CARD 2 GB GDDR5 NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 650M with Optimus™
HARD DRIVE 1TB 5,400 RPM SATA 3Gb/s
LCD PANEL 14.0" High Def+ (900p/1600x900) with WLED backlight
WIRELESS CARDS Intel® Centrino® Wireless-N 2230 With Bluetooth 4.0
INTERNAL OPTICAL DRIVE Slot-Loading Dual Layer Blu-ray Reader (BR-ROM, DVD+-RW, CD-RW)

Macbook Retina -CDN $1699 +taxes and such
13-inch: 2.6GHz
with Retina display
2.6GHz dual-core Intel Core i5
Turbo Boost up to 3.2GHz
8GB 1600MHz memory
256GB flash storage1
Intel HD Graphics 4000

Cheers

 

[OrangeWolf]

Do you need the discrete graphics for the type of Video/Photo Editing you want to do? Because the Alienware you link has discrete graphics while the MBP13 specs you quote do not. That might be something to consider.

I had a mid-2010 MBP13 for a while and I ran Windows on it via Dual-Boot for some software, and while Windows did run... well, it didn't run all that well. If you expect to use Windows a lot I'd probably go with another machine, otherwise the Mac OS is quite nice. I enjoyed my MBP13.

I'm a Thinkpad fanboy, so I'll toss out a suggestion to also check out the T430 series. *shrug* Best resolution you're going to get is 1600x900 though.

 

[R3d]

have the dedicated gfx would be nice, i'm not sure how the performance would be over the intel 4000 for vid editing, would it even handle some light gaming?

does windows usually have issues when running on the mac hardware? is the 7hr battery legit or in a best case scenario? anyone have any idea's for battery life of the m14x?

i'm a big fan of lenovo's as we use them for all of our workstations at my office, have a x201 as well and it's damn near bulletproof. The bluray in the M14x could be handy.