Thinking of MacBook to replace my Thinkpad

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KevC

Supreme [H]ardness
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So my Inspiron is having troubles and I need to replace it, therefore my Thinkpad is going back to my sister to use. Considering getting rid of the Dell and picking up a MacBook.

Probably going to spring for the 2GHz since it's only $150 more and sports a SuperDrive which would be nice.

I've only touched upon OSX and it seems sexy. The MacBook looks sexy. So I guess you can say I'm a pretty superficial person =)

I'm a photographer (full time student, but photography is my life) so I figure Apple might be a good decision. However, with the Intel processors I don't think Macs have much performance advantage in the end. I'd just buy into Apple for the software.

I'll try running Aperture even though it's not supported, might as well.

Is there anything I need to know about Macs? Anything that's not supported (it's hard to imagine that)? Besides games, I'd hardly play any.

Tell me about the little programs its bundled with. I wont use iPhoto because it messes with my RAW files (turns them into jpegs, blah). How about the rest? What are essential programs?

Programs that come with OSX? Stuff you need to buy? Maintence? Stuff like DeFrag, Reg maintence, can I forget about all that?
 
iPhoto turns RAWs into JPEGs? That's odd. Why would it do that?

Aperture will probably work, but chances are it will be slow. It mostly uses the video card to composit changes on top of the original (thusly leaving the file completely untouched). The video card in the Macbook sucks donkey balls.

Mac OS X is largely maintenence-free. It defrags any file smaller than 30 megabyte automatically every time it is touched. There is no registry that needs cleaning. People will tell you to get Onyx or something to do stuff, but there is really no need. Just leave the computer on at night every now and then. There are some stuff it does (automatically) at 3 AM. So just leave it on (not even sleep!) from time to time and it will be fine.
 
the only problem i could see for you as a photographer is that it will be another year until adobe releases a version of photoshop that is intel native (although you can run photoshop emulated it just has a lot of problems). Other than that it should be just fine... ive always thought the thinkpads were ugly as sin and they refuse to ever change that design.
 
photoshop does not have " a lot of problems" it is just run under rosetta so it does not run as fast as it could, because it is emulated. however you could always dualboot XP onto the macbook and run photoshop Native
 
as a photographer you can always look at something like lightroom. it is in a beta 3 phase, but it has good functionality and looks like it will be much better than aperture for photographers that use raw for everything. i am a photographer as well and lightroom really is nice for workflow. saves a lot of time in processing large numbers of photos.

the other nice thing about something like lightroom is you should be able to nail things in raw and only open photoshop (runs slow currently) for a few things.

joshua
 
I was playing with Lightroom on my coworkers Dual G5. IT seems kinda slow, but I'm not sure how much RAM she had.

Didn't really like it THAT much, I preferred Photoshop. But I probably don't know what I was doing.

I was looking at the Mac site and I'm afraid I might use my laptop for EVERYTHING. iLife seems awesome with iDVD.
 
KevC said:
I was playing with Lightroom on my coworkers Dual G5. IT seems kinda slow, but I'm not sure how much RAM she had.

Didn't really like it THAT much, I preferred Photoshop. But I probably don't know what I was doing.

I was looking at the Mac site and I'm afraid I might use my laptop for EVERYTHING. iLife seems awesome with iDVD.
Click to expand...
Lightroom is not a Photoshop replacer. It's a workflow enhancer. Kind of like using iPhoto and Photoshop Elements in conjunction, only More Awesome™.
 
Black Morty Rackham said:
Mac OS X is largely maintenence-free. It defrags any file smaller than 30 megabyte automatically every time it is touched. There is no registry that needs cleaning. People will tell you to get Onyx or something to do stuff, but there is really no need. Just leave the computer on at night every now and then. There are some stuff it does (automatically) at 3 AM. So just leave it on (not even sleep!) from time to time and it will be fine.
Click to expand...

There's no need to sometimes leave your computer on all night, even if you did there's a good chance these tasks won't run.

Unlike cron, launchd currently doesn't use your computer's clock to check if it's time to run a task, instead it acts more like a countdown timer. When it starts during bootup, it says OK I have X amount of time to run task XYZ. It then starts counting. If you put the mac to sleep, it pauses. If you restart/reboot, the counter gets reset. It's pretty fucked up, but if you never reboot your computer, then all your scheduled tasks will still run automatically. It's just they will be delayed by however long the mac was asleep during that period. For weekly and monthly tasks, this delay can add up quite a bit.

IMO, only daily tasks have a real shot at running, and even then they might not run everyday. For example, the Daily periodic script is set to run everyday at 3:15AM; however, a quick check in /var/log shows the file daily.out was last modified on Jun 28 13:11 -- that's over 24hrs ago and definitely not 3:15 in the morning.

Instead of trying to sometimes leave your computer on all night, I'd just recommend running the Weekly and Monthly periodic scripts once a week manually. In a terminal:
Code: 
sudo periodic weekly monthly

The Daily script will run enough on its own.
 
I am a graduate student who has spend almost 5 years now doing photography, some paid shoots, getting heavy into fashion.

The Macbook will work for photography. Aperture runs on mine fine, but be sure to upgrade to 2GB of RAM, it helps compensate for the graphics card (hell 2GB is like $150 now). If you are very serious about photography, spring for an iMac (as long as you don't need the portability).

I was just using a MBP. I loved it, but decided to sell it and get a 17" inteliMac (hooked up to my 2005fpw of course) for photography and the MB for general screwing around. I do however run Aperture on the macbook 1) because I can and 2) for small on the road projects.

Also, I've found the Photoshop works pretty well even under Rosetta. It isn't extremely fast, but it makes you a better photographer ;)

Plus, you can always load Windows and run Photoshop at full speed if needbe.
 
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