OS X Laptop for $3,000 - Macbook Pro?

[Dorons]

Hi,

 

I have been using osx86 machines for a few years now, and i love OS X!!

 

I'm about to dish out $3,000 for a mobile workstation.

It must run Snow Leopard - i am not going to go back to windows, and i wanted to get your advice on whether to go ahead and buy a macbook pro or if there's an alternative that would give me a machine with similar build quality + some extra juice - the apple logo.

 

The Macbook pro configuration i was thinking about is the 15" i7 with the higher res screen, 8gb and perhaps the smallest SSD.

 

Is there any similar Dell/Lenovo/Vaio/HP(ugh!) machine that can run OS X nicely (i.e. CI/QE, sound,lan,etc) or am i just wasting everybody's time?

[bonestonne]

$3000 for a mobile workstation? What kind of work does it have to do?

 

If you're not doing HD video editing (and lets be honest, if you were, you would need a scratch disk + camera or input source) so I think the 15" non-i7 would be just as good for any normal human being.

 

I now use a first generation MacBook Pro (Core Duo model) for my mobile workstation, and it gets the job done. I bought it used for $675. I do 24/96 audio recording on it (up to 4 channels at a time, as that's all I do currently, it could do up to near 24 or so if I needed it to).

 

It's got all the bells and whistles such as backlit keyboard, webcam and i put in a 250gb drive. The battery lasts almost 3 hours as well.

[LoneWaffle]

If you only want to run OS X on a laptop and have $3,000 to put towards it, you'd be a fool to not buy a genuine Mac. To spend that kind of money on a laptop running OS X and still not have a multitouch trackpad, or any of the other niceties afforded by Apple design would be unacceptable, IMHO.

[Dorons]

$3000 for a mobile workstation? What kind of work does it have to do?

 

If you're not doing HD video editing (and lets be honest, if you were, you would need a scratch disk + camera or input source) so I think the 15" non-i7 would be just as good for any normal human being.

 

I now use a first generation MacBook Pro (Core Duo model) for my mobile workstation, and it gets the job done. I bought it used for $675. I do 24/96 audio recording on it (up to 4 channels at a time, as that's all I do currently, it could do up to near 24 or so if I needed it to).

 

It's got all the bells and whistles such as backlit keyboard, webcam and i put in a 250gb drive. The battery lasts almost 3 hours as well.

 

Well, you're right but you're not totally right. I'm going to use the machine mostly for web app development. I know it seems like an overkill (and probably is) but i want this machine to last a good 3-4 years before i even think about replacing it, so i am planning ahead. Perhaps it is foolish (i guess this is why i came asking for expert advice) but i thought that getting a machine that's beefed up will extend it's life expectancy greatly. I've been doing this with PC laptops for over 15 years (mostly with Thinkpads) and it has proven to be a good scheme.

Just so you know, my main issue is with the fact that, with my current desktop rig (Q6600+8GB RAM) When i have Firefox (running firebug) with 15-20 tabs, Chrome running another 15 tabs and parallels running IE8 and IE7 all together, i'm maxing out the RAM and performance is sluggish.

 

Having said all that, i think it might be more prudent to get the i5. I actually am more concerned with the i7's heat than its cost (difference is $300 between the 2.4 i5 and the 2.66 i7).

 

Also, do you think the SSD is worth its price? should i get one off newegg and install it myself? would the SSD's benefits be any use for me (considering i'm mostly debugging)?

 

 

 

If you only want to run OS X on a laptop and have $3,000 to put towards it, you'd be a fool to not buy a genuine Mac. To spend that kind of money on a laptop running OS X and still not have a multitouch trackpad, or any of the other niceties afforded by Apple design would be unacceptable, IMHO.

 

Thanks for your wise words. I tend to agree.

I guess its just that i've gotten so used to running off generic hardware that it feels "wrong" to get a branded mac machine .

 

The questions that remain are:

Should i go with the 2.4 i5 or the 2.66 i7?

Should i go for an SSD (considering the machine will mostly be used for coding/debugging)?

Should i get the 8gb from apple (at the insane upgrade price of $400!!)?

[bonestonne]

I can never get a straight answer from any mac user, so here's my breakdown:

 

Does Mac support hyperthreading? A Core i7 processor is a quad core, with Hyper Threading, which means it should show 8 total cores. All I ever hear is that the new Nehalem Macs with dual i7 are 8 cores. They should show up as 16 cores, because of hyperthreading. In short, that's a huge ripoff.

 

If you get a Core i5, it will show up as a dual core, as it's a dual core processor with hyperthreading.

 

The i5 series is very power efficient, and powerful, but there's no point in buying any Core i* series processor if you can't use all the physical and logical cores. Simple as that.

 

As to the IBM/Lenovo laptops, I think they're great, I work in a PC shop, and very rarely see them, and if I do, it's just for upgrades, I've never had one come in with broken parts before.

 

Getting the most beefed up machine at the time isn't always more prudent, because if it's a first generation, you could have heat issues (especially before a die shrink)...I tend to feel that early adopters want the power now, but the price drops in a few months and they always complain about the new version has this, that and the other.

 

In short, yes, I realize now that you need the power, but I would say an i5 could do it, as long as it had 8gb of RAM, but at the same time, I wouldn't really suggest doing so much on a laptop, it would go through a lot of heat cycles from trying to go into idle (macs do this more often than PCs). That's what caused the nvidia mac problems a while back.

 

I also don't completely trust SSDs yet, I know they're advancing quickly, but I'm going to wait until they're much cheaper and simpler to set up before I go get one (in terms of TRIM and pagefiles).

[Zaap]

If you only want to run OS X on a laptop and have $3,000 to put towards it, you'd be a fool to not buy a genuine Mac. To spend that kind of money on a laptop running OS X and still not have a multitouch trackpad, or any of the other niceties afforded by Apple design would be unacceptable, IMHO.

+1 on this.

 

I can't tell the OP which Macbook to get, but definitely when it comes to notebooks and OSX, Apple is the way to go.

 

As for getting use out of the machine, man, I really think people are spoiled when it comes to laptop! (And that's not nessisarily a bad thing, it just shows how far along laptop development has come that we all expect full desktop performance from a portable machine).

 

I'm typing this on a G4 TiBook 550/1GB RAM that's 9 years old. Apple built this machine so well that it still seems to me like a fairly new laptop (for the basics, web, word, light graphics, etc.)

 

The modern MacBooks are freakin' awesome machines. I'm no PC-hating Mac snob, but to me, no one beats Apple for quality when it comes to laptops. Go to the Apple store and mess around with the machines until you find the Macbook model that suits you. Buyers remorse with a Macbook is practically non-existent- heck, my love of this laptop has lasted nine-years!

[Mackilroy]

I can never get a straight answer from any mac user, so here's my breakdown:

 

Does Mac support hyperthreading? A Core i7 processor is a quad core, with Hyper Threading, which means it should show 8 total cores. All I ever hear is that the new Nehalem Macs with dual i7 are 8 cores. They should show up as 16 cores, because of hyperthreading. In short, that's a huge ripoff.

How can you not get a straight answer? Core processors in Macs are exactly the same as Core processors in PCs. No Mac has dual i7 processors. The Mac Pro has dual Xeons, but that isn't the same thing. And yes, they do show up as 16 cores, and the quad-core iMacs show up as eight cores.

 

Where's the ripoff?