I have a friend who wants to buy a Mac laptop of some kind.
The purpose is to spend all the time working with a Mac running the modern OS and acquire adequate familiarity to become a certified Apple trainer, along with becoming an administrator and/or desktop support engineer.
The Air is too minimal for taste.
Gaming capacity is desired, so the 13 inch MacBook Pro is out, given its weak graphics subsystem.
Budget is in the $2000 range, but can be pushed to $2500 if need be.
So… new unit from the local Apple Store?
Refurb from Apple Store online?
Some other source?
New from Best Buy?
Amazon Marketplace vendors?
Ebay?
You want a MacBookPro. And I’d go Apple Refurb-- I just got one. Love it.
Rumor is that they’re coming out with a MBP that’s skinny like the MacBook Air. Intel just finished the chips, should be out in the next few months. Here’s my bet: your friend would rather have the current model, due to the compromising they’ll have to do to cut weight/thickness. But I’d wait til you at least know what’s coming out.
He would better off spending $1250 on a MacBook Air, and $1250 on a purpose-built gaming desktop.
I went through 3 MacBook Pros over the years, all for the same reason your friend might think he wants one - because I wanted to play games. But laptops just suck at games, especially Mac laptops, which are simply not intended for gaming at all. He will spend $2,500 on a laptop to get the same graphics hardware he could get in a $400 desktop. It’s just not worth the money.
The MacBook Airs have fast processors and fast SSDs. They are great, fully capable computers for anything but games, and have the added benefit of the weight and size of a folded newspaper. And a $1,250 desktop will perform better on games than any Mac laptop you can buy, for any price, for the next 1-2 years.
The higher end MacBook Pros are the finest laptops out there, IMHO (despite the trouble experienced on the first purchase). The Quad-Core i7 15" is right in your 2k range, and the 17" version is pushing $2,500.
Of course, if portability isn’t a huge issue, the iMacs are fantastic desktops as well. The trade off is a bit more horsepower, larger monitor and a bit more expandability. The high-end 27" 3.1GHz quad core is right at 2k as well.
I’m in Michigan, but I’ve been purchasing most of my major hardware from the MacPac in Oregon. Great customer service, friendly and they usually have great deals or throw in free shipping or something like that as well.
Just to address the new vs. refurb thing, I bought my MacBook Pro from the refurb site, and it arrived packaged as new, with the same warranty as a new machine, and I have had nary a problem with it. I basically got a brand-new machine for $400 off the sticker price. Highly recommend doing it that way if the refurb site has what you’re looking for.
There is a subtext here that my friend will be using the system to run limited virtualization for training purposes, as Cisco and Microsoft certification is in the near future. A 500 GB mechanical HDD should work great for those kind of things, while entry level SSD sizes are questionable unless the number of VMs is kept very limited.
MsWhatsit,
When I looked there, we have an older machine that specs the same as the new ones, marked down from its original price but at exact price parity with the current models.
Literally, the savings for going refurb from the Apple Store were under one United States dollar, and we would be getting a machine with more wear and tear on it already.
So, forgot to post this before.
We went to an Apple Store (chased by a trip to The Cheesecake Factory… YUM!!) last night and looked around.
My friend pretty much settled on the MacBook Pro with these specs:
15-inch: 2.2 GHz
2.2GHz quad-core
Intel Core i7
4GB 1333MHz
500GB 5400-rpm1
Intel HD Graphics 3000
AMD Radeon HD 6750M with 512MB GDDR5
REGULAR PRICE $1799
It gets my friend into ‘real video card’ territory, and with a RAM upgrade down the road to 8GB, it has the processing power to run 3 or 4 not-too-heavy VMs at once and practice sysadmin work… all the while being portable.
Now, about 20 minutes ago, I just realized my friend is in grad school at a local state university, so…
Discount prices found here:
That system will be $100 cheaper than what I quoted above.
In addition, the next one up is $200 cheaper than it normally would be, with $2199 turning into $1999.
15-inch: 2.4 GHz
2.4GHz quad-core
Intel Core i7
4GB 1333MHz
750GB 5400-rpm1
Intel HD Graphics 3000
AMD Radeon HD 6770M with 1GB GDDR5
Built-in battery (7 hours)2
REGULAR PRICE $2199
New question: the spread to the next model up is now smaller, but still notable. Anyone think it’s worth jumping the gap to the next model up?
Looks like it gets an extra 250 GB of mechanical disk drive and an extra 1/2 GB of video RAM, along with a slightly higher clock speed on the video processor and CPU.
The student price would be $1699 for that first one and $1999 for the second one.
I’m having trouble justifying it.
The slight GHz bump will be negligible. But the extra HD space and twice as much VRAM I think is worth it over the long run, especially for what your friend has in mind.
ETA: get the 7200 rpm drive for the xtra $50, IMHO.
Oh yeah, the plan is to take delivery with the standard RAM count.
Later, Best Buy or another authorized facility can do the RAM upgrade, before the project that may cause more RAM to become needful starts.
Can’t your friend upgrade the memory himself? Certainly if he intends to become a computer technician, this is something that he will need to know how to do.