Thinking of buying MacBook Pro

[highflyer40]

Just looking to purchase a new laptop and have always used windows based OS. We are now thinking of a MacBook Pro, but they are over twig the cost of a windows OS, do you actually get your money's worth? Everything else in the house is apple products, so we do like it.

[mixture]

highflyer40,

We are now thinking of a MacBook Pro, but they are over twig the cost of a windows OS, do you actually get your money's worth?

Yes, absolutely, as long as you obey the usual rules of buying any computer in terms of Maximum RAM and a picking a reasonable processor.

Most Macbooks come with 8GB RAM these days, so if you can afford more, then great, but otherwise its really just the processor you need to worry about, in which case its the same as in the PC world, if you can afford/stretch to Intel i7, then that should absolutely be your target but otherwise a decent i5 based machine will suffice.

Most Macbooks also come with built-in SSDs these days, you don't need to work hard to avoid spindles, from memory I think they've only got one model with spindles, their entry-level basic one.

If you do a lot of graphics work, then you could consider the higher end models with the beefy GPU. But if you don't know your Photoshop from your Lightroom, or your Premiere from your After Effects, or don't even know what a GPU is, then you'll probably find you don't need to concern yourself too much in that area.

Robust, reliable, well designed computers. OS X is a pleasure to work with.

Plus you can run Windows in a virtual machine without problems, I do it every day.

There might also still be the little known added bonus that you can legally buy an OEM copy of Windows to run on Apple hardware. I say might, because you'll need to check the license terms for current versions of Windows (8 or 10) , its been a little while since I looked. Normally Windows OEM has to be bundled with hardware by the manufacturer at the time of purchase. But as I said, please check current license conditions.

Make sure you get the AppleCare warranty, it does help. Plus I think they even cover accidental damage these days !

In terms of costs comparisons, two things :
(1) You should really be doing an ROI comparison ... a decent MacBook Pro will absolutely be able to last you somewhere between three and five years.
(2) Make sure you are comparing properly..... the Windows OS department is full of very nasty crap that looks cheap on the price tag, but that's because it is cheap inside ! (stuff like celeron processors, nasty slow hard drives and whatnot). I'm NOT saying the cheapest possible entry-level Apple MacBook is perfect, but its light years away from the cheap entry-level end of the PC market !

P.S. highflyer40 ... beware the stupid resident Apple bashers who lurk in the PPRuNe forums. Take what they say with a pinch of salt if they decide to contribute their "valuable" opinion to your question.

[highflyer40]

We basically only use a laptop for Microsoft office (which you can get for Apple products ( just not iPads) just very tired of getting a computer and then within 6 months it is so slow!!

[mixture]

highflyer40,

Its Microsoft's fault, not Apple's, but I will say that the current version of Office for Mac is not the best. Its lagging behind the Windows version a bit (well, it is called Office for Mac 2011 afterall ). I believe Microsoft (finally) have a new version coming out very soon !

So if you need all the bells and whisles, until the new version comes out, you'll need to be prepared to use a virtual machine with Windows and the windows version of office.

But my last Macbook survived about 4 years of heavy usage (including multiple drops off tables). Current one is about 2 and a bit years old and still going strong. But I know other people who are well into the 5th year.

[highflyer40]

Thanks Mixture

[Bob Viking]

Once you go Mac you'll never look back. I have a top end MacBook Air that is still going strong after 3.5 years. I'm currently looking at an iMac for a replacement (iPads take care of all the portable stuff we do).
Unless Apple completely screw things up I will never buy another windows based product as long as I live.
Others will disagree but in my opinion Apple wins hands down. You will not regret it.
BV

[ExXB]

Echo above with one caveat.

Wife has Macbook, I an iMac both from 2009. Both going strong. We've got Office for Mac on both, but it isn't really that good. We use Apple's free Pages programme which, although not a clone of office, it does everything we need. Apple also provides free spreadsheet and presentation software. All of which can write files in MS format.

On memory the rule of thumb for any PC is to get as much as you can or afford. But Apple's extra memory is expensive and not good value for money. But adding memory to most Macs is a doddle. I've upgraded both our machines to maximum using chips from thes guys : Other World Computing (OWC) - Performance Upgrades For Your Mac (http://www.macsales.com). (Satisfied customer speaking, no other relationship with company) Their website has videos showing how to install the chips, so you can decide in advance if it's something you want to do.

MS Word etc, is available for the iPad, but it's a subscription product.

[sherburn2LA]

don't take any notice of the Apple fanboy. Courtesy of my employer I have one that is about as high end as you can get. Obviously something with 8 CPUs 16G memory and 500G SSD can't be described as a heap of junk but value for money it is not.

Nor is it robust. I dropped mine from the grand height of one inch on the corner and because the screen is integrated with the lid it has invalidated the warranty. Plus if you don't fold the power cord in the Mac special way you will soon be subject to the Apple rip off for a new one.

The OS is the most irritating patronising thing you will ever come across. You would be far better with a regular Windows or Linux on the same spec of machine for half the price.

[ExXB]

Don't feed the troll...

[innuendo]

But adding memory to most Macs is a doddle. I've upgraded both our machines to maximum using chips from thes guys : Other World Computing (OWC) - Performance Upgrades For Your Mac. (Satisfied customer speaking, no other relationship with company) Their website has videos showing how to install the chips, so you can decide in advance if it's something you want to do.


Caveat: You might want to do a bit of research on upgrading RAM on Apples laptops. With older laptops it was possible to add RAM from third party sources.

Today's Apple laptops have RAM soldered in. I just had a quick look at their site and unless I have missed something I believe that if you want more RAM than offered as standard you must specify that when you order what you want.

I believe that the only models that you can add other than Apple RAM are the 27" iMac and the Mac Pro.

I second the suggestion to max the RAM to your budget limits.
FWIW I have a 2007 MBP 15" that still works well and can run Yosemite, not the fastest but it still works well.

[ExXB]

OK, thanks for the update.

[mixture]

Today's Apple laptops have RAM soldered in. I just had a quick look at their site and unless I have missed something I believe that if you want more RAM than offered as standard you must specify that when you order what you want.

Many mountains were made out of molehills on the topic of soldering RAM, but it is a sensible reliability decision, and it also allows Apple to design their products to tighter tolerances, allowing for a thinner, lighter design.

As I said above, most except the very basic Apple Mac Book Pros now come with 8GB of RAM by default. Which is normally more than enough for your average Joe.

But as I always say, if you can afford more RAM, you should buy it, so if you can afford to bump up to 16GB then its a cheap way to afford yourself extra peace of mind.

If there is any prospect of you ever wanting to do more intensive stuff, such as running Windows in a virtual machine, then of course, bumping up to 16GB is no longer an option, but a must !

[Capn Bloggs]

a decent MacBook Pro will absolutely be able to last you somewhere between three and five years.
Yep, I had to retire my no-name Windows laptop after 11 years because the little switch which turned off the screen when I closed the lid packed up. I mean, for goodness sake! Get a grip on yourselves you Windows Laptop makers! :}

16gb of RAM with an SSD? What are you doing on that thing??

[mixture]

16gb of RAM with an SSD? What are you doing on that thing??

Admittedly I do push my laptops harder than most... :)

Various virtual machines running simultaneously
Various pieces of Adobe software
All sorts really....

But occasionally, Firefox just feels like being a memory hog and going back to its old ways of using up 2 or 3GB of RAM for no perceptible reason at all. :ugh:


But yes, it did occur to me when writing my previous post, that for the average Joe, perhaps SSD based swap space would not be the end of the world. But I've never tried it so I can't condone it, hence my (perhaps) "old school" suggestion of just boosting RAM.

On the subject of soldered RAM, there is also this quote from an ASIC design engineer (my highlighting of the last paragraph) :

You seemed to wonder why the memory on the MBP Retina would be so much faster than the memory on the regular MBP or any other machine. You were correct when stating the memory soldered on would be more efficient. When designing a motherboard the manufacturer must adhere to a defined standard for the DIMM that is selected. This includes wire lengths, and capacitance, and results in generally slightly less than ideal settings to make it compatible with a vast array of different manufacturers. By soldering the memory directly on to the board Apple is able to define the exact memory access scheme, as they will only ever have to work with the chips that they selected, and don’t have to meet any standards for the DIMM connectors, etc.

This allows the fine tuning of latency to the absurd levels. In fact, with the 22nm Intel there is an option via low level register programming, to reduce the latency of the DDR memory down to 0 clocks. While this is not possible in reality, it gives Apple the room it needs to fine tune the memory and provide the best throughput possible. The values you were reporting were almost 100% utilization of the FSB of the CPU (16,384 MB/s being 100%). You were reporting 99.90% utilization, which is UNHEARD of, but not impossible.

If nothing else, you must tip your hat to Apple for this, that is an incredible job of matching memory to memory controller, and setting the CPU to properly utilize the memory. You will NEVER see this on a computer that supports DIMMs, it is not possible.

(Those words from this website MPG - Apple MacBook Pro Retina Quad-Core (June 2012) - 2012 MBP Retina ? Memory Bandwidth (http://macperformanceguide.com/mbpRetina2012-speed-memory-bandwidth.html))

[cattletruck]

I was in exactly the same dilemma.

Yes the MBPro is overpriced, but it is better than its mainstream competitor by a country mile.

I was so tired of the "boffin" Windoze formula I sought some clean air and found it in the MBPro. So far it's been a great experience (though I had done Mac in the past), I am just fortunate to be in a position at the moment to enjoy luxury over cost, and what a breath of fresh air it has been.

Of course if I were a tight @rse I would probably have stuck with Windoze as it's backwards compatibly with all my previous baggage, but I really wanted a change for the sake of it and MBPro delivered just that. It still has the very real potential to be used in "boffin" anger but I really couldn't give a rats. I do Unix/Linux in my sleep so with the power of VMWare/Fusion I still have all that "boffin" power at my fingertips anyway.

Yes it's pricier, but if you tire of Windoze like me, it's well worth it.

[Saab Dastard]

Soldered RAM:

I have noticed that more & more small-form factor Windows tablets / laptops and hybrid tablet / laptop devices are shipping with soldered RAM. It is by no means an Apple phenomenon.

This is (I'm told by HP) to allow thinner and more compact devices - which is what the market is telling the manufacturers that is required. Although I'm sure that there are other reasons as well!

SD

[Keef]

I can see the benefits of soldered RAM!

I lent my laptop to a friend to do some testing on software he's developing. He brought it back (very worried) after half an hour saying it wouldn't boot up. The POST beep codes (3143) showed "RAM problem". Reseating the RAM fixed it.

[cavortingcheetah]

Over the last four years I've bought three Macs and, in various combinations and renewals, I've also bought the Apple Care Protection Plan and One to One. With the two laptops, I've taken advantage of these two programmes from Johannesburg to San Diego via Munich, even England, and many stops in between. I've never paid Apple a penny for repairs or training and if you want training then you should see the tutorial set up in San Francisco.
Macs have their detractors but they have no equal in terms of international back up, training and location convenience.

[Biggles78]

so if you can afford to bump up to 16GB
Eek, with what apple charge for upgrading 8GB of RAM, I could almost buy a small country.

Highflyer, if you want to avoid both fanboi camps then you may wish to consider an alternative to both apple and microsoft. apple has a "walled garden" as far as hardware and software goes and microsoft are pushing their software to a "walled garden". They both want to lock you into their products and trap you there forever. Changing to the mac OS from windows will be a big jump but then going to MS OS X (windows 10 ) will be almost as big. Both companies are aggressively forcing people to the Cloud as is Google's Chromebook (something I would avoid like the Black Death)

Buy the hardware you think will suffice for the next 3 to 5 years and install a Linux variety. Will be a bit of a pain to get used to but it may be worth it in the long run.

FWIW, I service both apple and microsoft systems form Servers to laptops and dislike them both equally. :)

[mixture]

Biggles78 is your prime example of someone jumping on the apple bashing bandwagon who has absolutely no clue about what they are talking about.

8gb to 16gb upgrade costs around 160eur, not exactly expensive.

As for anyone who talks about apple being a "walled garden". That's more absolute trash. Anybody can write software for apple, you can use plain old c/c++ if you don't want to use apple Developer tools. Nor do you need any approval from Apple.

[Mac the Knife]

"But yes, it did occur to me when writing my previous post, that for the average Joe, perhaps SSD based swap space would not be the end of the world. But I've never tried it so I can't condone it, hence my (perhaps) "old school" suggestion of just boosting RAM."

I don't think it's "old school" at all, just sensible. Swap files are really a hangover from the old days of limited RAM and are only retained for compatibility's sake. It is far cheaper (and more reliable) to take your RAM up to 16gb or more (you don't HAVE to buy expensive Apple RAM - which is just rebranded something else with the price doubled) rather than complicate matters by adding a more expensive SSD to assign for your swap partition/files.

Remember the days when applications used to switch overlay files in and out? I do!

Dear Lord, I'm agreeing with mixture...must take a couple of aspirins and lie down!

Mac

:rolleyes:

[Background Noise]

Don't think you can do that anymore Mac - the RAM is no longer upgradeable and has to be specified at the time of purchase.

[Mac the Knife]

True alas BN, I was thinking about the last generation of MacBooks, laptops generally and big fat do-it-yourself desktop Intel/AMD mobos.

AFAIK there's no way of adding another SSD to the new MacBooks and I'm not even sure you can change the one that's factory fitted either.

Most new laptops fall pretty low on the iFixit scale these days - having been mostly assembled by machine in cleanrooms all they need is a little oriental wageslave to irretrievably hot-glue the last bits together.

The OS'es are getting a bit strict too - I can't upgrade my new'ish Mac Mini to Yosemite from Mavericks because it won't TRIM my added-on non-Apple Samsung SSD.

Buy it, use it and if anything goes wrong or a new OS version is incompatible just bin it and buy another.

So it goes...

Mac :{

I did love the days when you could tinker with the OS and access the bare-metal from programs. Writing self-modifying code that changed the stack/registers as it ran was sort of fun. You could do supposedly impossible things!

Stupid old fart that I am....

:ok:

[mixture]

The OS'es are getting a bit strict too - I can't upgrade my new'ish Mac Mini to Yosemite from Mavericks because it won't TRIM my added-on non-Apple Samsung SSD.

You don't really need to fret too much about TRIM. Its not a vital necessity, just a nice to have, modern SSDs have all sorts of other intelligence in them without needing TRIM.

There are many ways to skin a cat, TRIM is only one of them.

As it happens, I upgraded an old MacBook to Samsung SSD for a friend recently and it works perfectly fine.

[Mac the Knife]

Mix - The problem from what I can gather) is that if you are running a system with TRIM Enabler and you upgrade your Mac to OS X Yosemite, your machine will not boot after the install finishes due to the new Kext signing requirement in Yosemite – all kexts (drivers) now need to be approved/signed by Apple.nforces kext

It IS possible to disable kext signing (a very good idea) in PRAM and allow 3rd party TRIM to work but this seems to me like a retrograde step. If for some reason PRAM has to be reset, the enforcement of kext signing (and this is a global setting) is reset and you have a machine that won't boot. Yosemite only recognises Apple and OWC drives for TRIM purposes.

I stuffed a 500gb Samsung 840 Pro in my recent MacMini to work as the System disk and kept the original HDD as my Data disk (as you know, I prefer to keep System and Data physical drives separate). Yes, I know that TRIM may be largely unnecessary with modern SDDs but I don't want to upgrade and end up with an unbootable machine or an SSD that gets slower and slower!

I understand that there are 3rd party apps like Cindori that claim to overcome the problem but I have to have a stable office systemthat will run various VMs as well.

I suppose I could junk it and just buy a whole new MacMini to the specs I want from the local Mac shop but that would squeeze my budget a bit - particularly as the MM is only a couple of years old. I could always find a use for the old one.

Currently everything works fine with Mavericks and 16gb RAM.

Your advice would be welcome.

Thx

Mac

[mixture]

It IS possible to disable kext signing (a very good idea)

A good idea to disable kext signing ? Please tell me you made a typing mistake.

Disabling kext signing is a stupid idea of the highest proportions. :=

Kext signing is there as a valuable security barrier.

Yes, I know that TRIM may be largely unnecessary with modern SDDs but I don't want to upgrade and end up with an unbootable machine or an SSD that gets slower and slower!

Well, the machines is definitely bootable, as I've done the upgrade myself, and yes that's running the latest 10.10.3.

If you are really worried about not having TRIM, then perhaps you should just get yourself a 15k rpm spindle drive instead. That should give you a half-decent performance boost.

Alternativley, when I was doing some research, there was a Swiss (I think) manufacturer who were making SSD drives that had apparently TRIM support under kext OS X. They were a bit cagey about how they achieved it, so I didn't proceed any further, but if you want to persist with a TRIM enabled SSD, they might be worth a look. I will update this post if I remember the name.

Update:
angelbird "SSD wrk for Mac" .... but as I said, not a recommendation, just a name I spotted during research. And its an Austrian, not Swiss company.

[Mac the Knife]

Hallo mix!

Of course I made a typing mistake :{

The "not" got lost in a bit of editing - it should have been (NOT a very good idea), since it is in fact an extremely BAD idea!

OTOH Mavericks can allow unsigned kexts and AFAIK this has not been a major attack vector (though naturally it potentially is and may get worse).

Yes, I did come across Angelbird and their claims - unless they have managed to get a signed kext from Apple, they've may have found an unofficial hack (never a good idea in a commercial product).

Many thanks

Mac

"If you are really worried about not having TRIM, then perhaps you should just get yourself a 15k rpm spindle drive instead. That should give you a half-decent performance boost."

Actually this is a very good idea! Only occasionally do I do much major disk intensive work and I'm wasting important surgical energy on worrying about **** like this.



{Just on the side; Samsung could [B]well afford to license a properly signed and verified kext from Apple to allow TRIM on their drives. Do their controllers have a compatibility problem at some level with Yosemite or is Apple just being difficult?}

Hamba khale!

:ok:

[mixture]

SSDs are great, but really only worth worrying about for laptops where their inherent robustness is worth it.

At least that's my view on them. I guess if I spent my days doing something that hammered the drive then I'd think again, but for me, most of the stuff I do benefits from more RAM rather than a faster hard drive.

I think Apple might use Samsung at storage chip level rather than drive, but I can't remember it that's in computers or iPhone/iPads.

Rumour has it a trimforce command has appeared in the developer version of the new version of OS X. Whether it stays there in the final version remains to be seen, but it would answer the prayers of those who really want TRIM.

[cattletruck]

I couldn't justify the cost of a MBPro spec'd to the maximum SSD capability. I had a requirement for terabytes of VMs which not even the highest spec'd MBPro would solve, and even if it could all this great SSD performance would be wasted.

The solution was to work a little smarter and create a NAS out of my old Windows desktop PC. For travel I brought a 1TB Toshiba portable drive for about $50 which I use like a big USB stick.

Keeping my laptop "thin" in data seems to be working quite well for me, another bonus has been that all my other old laptops ('bout time I donated them) can also access the same data the same way.

[Mac the Knife]

FreeNAS - FreeNAS Project - Open Source Storage - FreeNAS Project (http://www.freenas.org/) is your friend.

Build your own NAS out of unused junk - it is far more secure, configurable, stable and (depending on your hardware) fast than just about anything you can buy.

You will, unfortunately have to know something about hardware and RTFM, but it is now far easier to set up than its earlier incarnations.

Mac

:ok: