Someone sell me on the macbook please.

[Beyond D espair]

For my College program I was forced to get a Mac laptop and had to get Parallels just to run windows programs on it for the course.

At first I detested the very idea of getting a mac, but after the first month, I changed just about every negative opinion I had about it. I really like the touch pad and the interface was extremely easy to get use to. It's not so great for games, but Steam made things a lot better.

I absolutely cannot recommend parallels for it though. If you have to run a windows based program on your mac, Bootcamp is pretty much the best solution I've found.

Parallels on the mac just made me hate my mac and my life...

 

[Beyond D espair]

(sorry double post. Internet's been strange latly in my area.)

 

[octafish]

Great battery life, great screen, great build quality (I've only ever experienced Macbook Pros) nice keyboard, they do tend to "just work". Very few viruses are written with macs in mind.

 

[Ken Sapp]

This is why we have so many "I linke this girl but don't know what to do threads on here"
Macs are style items that are at the same time highly functional. Period.
Yes you can get better value elsewhere. But no-one but a bunch of nerds is going to be impressed by your' home built zomg uber machine with i7 processor and 12 gigs of ram. No-one is going to be impressed that you built a PC with the same specs a Mac for half the price. Particularly not girls. I might be impressed by your' uber machines, the people on this site might be impressed but most people wont.

People need to start realizing that in todays world computers are about more than what's on the inside. They have become more like clothing. Sure you can buy a cashmere sweater anywhere for maybe 100 bucks or less. Just don't expect to look better or to be more impressive than the guy show spent 600 bucks on a designer one. they both have teh same function, heck the cheaper one may even be more practical since it's machine washable. But no-one but you cares.

All the mac hate always makes me realize what a lack of understanding there is amongst the "gaming community" of the real world.

The girls may not be impressed by the "uber-leet" rig you built for half the price but they will likely be impressed by the fat wad of cash you have to spend on them since you didn't waste it on an overpriced style-item computer.

Macs have their uses and if that is what you want then more power to you. For anyone other than a gamer, developer or other specialist who needs a high powered machine to do their work a netbook, generic laptop or desktop is more than sufficient. In other words, if you only use a computer to access the internet, email and use office type apps then a Mac is a horribly expensive solution to your needs.

So can someone give me some pros about a macbook,

ummm... they're not a choking hazard for children under 2? if you're ever attacked by hipster fuckheads you can throw it at them and make your escape while they stand around telling each other how awesome it is to be an iDrone? You can kill a chihuahua with one?

and why I should pay $400 to rent one for 2 years.

You shouldn't... unless you can get a full tax rebate for the money. Preferably with added compensation for mental anguish and suffering.

You should also demand your school tell you why you HAVE to have a macbook. Most of their answers will be piss easy to tear to pieces.

There is no reason you should have to pay money out of pocket to "rent" a computer, mac or otherwise from the school. A security deposit which is returned to you when you return the computer at the end would be fine but otherwise the cost should come out of the taxes your family and community are already paying to support the school.

 

[Duol]

Snip


And the reason no1 complains when people say Mac sucks is because they generally are significantly overpriced for what they are. Also more expensive=/= more appealing as you seem to think. You can be presentable without spending stupid amounts of money. If the deciding factor if somebody likes you is the things you have, is that really somebody you want to know? well you might but I certainly don't.

Your statement seems to be

http://www.laptopsarena.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/acer-laptop-computers.jpg

looks worse than

http://www.inquisitr.com/wp-content/2009/12/macbook.png
Just because the marketing says it doesn't make it so.

[/quote]

It's not about what you or I find visually appealing or attractive. People have particular associations with the Apple brand and these perceptions are overwhelmingly positive for the most part, like it or not. I'm not saying you should base every interaction with another human being on physical possessions. However many people do make instant sub-conscious decisions on who they want to talk to and associate with based on physical appearances, this includes possessions.

I am not talking about long term relationships, only initial impressions, which are very important in my opinion these days. let's create an example:

You're sitting in a coffee shop with your laptop out doing some work and listening to music. Then an attractive member of the opposite sex walks in. They see one of two scenarios:
Person sitting there with a Macbook Pro, simple crappy white earbuds resting in their ears.
Person sitting there with a big gray box open and giant can headphones on their head.

Seems pretty obvious which person is more approachable, to most people at least. In todays' world people have contact with an overwhelming number of people and information. This has made us form a very quick selection procedure that we apply to everyone and everything we meet to determine whether it meets our criteria. Why not take advantage of this and appeal to as many people as possible?

All those other examples of computer you mention are also priced higher because of their looks. You just don't have to pay for the apple badge and reputation that comes with it.
You may say I'm just conforming with society... I am, you know why? Because I am interested in getting as far as I can in this world. If that means a small occasional sacrifice, particularly in monetary terms then so what.
Again not to say that this is the only reason to buy a Mac, I think there are many other good reasons. However I am trying to look at the very argument that is used against Mac on here constantly from a different angle.

 

[black-magic]

For my College program I was forced to get a Mac laptop and had to get Parallels just to run windows programs on it for the course.

At first I detested the very idea of getting a mac, but after the first month, I changed just about every negative opinion I had about it. I really like the touch pad and the interface was extremely easy to get use to. It's not so great for games, but Steam made things a lot better.

I absolutely cannot recommend parallels for it though. If you have to run a windows based program on your mac, Bootcamp is pretty much the best solution I've found.

Parallels on the mac just made me hate my mac and my life...

Aha! I knew you liked it! *sob sob sob*

 

[bob1052]

This is why we have so many "I linke this girl but don't know what to do threads on here"
Macs are style items that are at the same time highly functional. Period.
Yes you can get better value elsewhere. But no-one but a bunch of nerds is going to be impressed by your' home built zomg uber machine with i7 processor and 12 gigs of ram. No-one is going to be impressed that you built a PC with the same specs a Mac for half the price. Particularly not girls. I might be impressed by your' uber machines, the people on this site might be impressed but most people wont.

People need to start realizing that in todays world computers are about more than what's on the inside. They have become more like clothing. Sure you can buy a cashmere sweater anywhere for maybe 100 bucks or less. Just don't expect to look better or to be more impressive than the guy show spent 600 bucks on a designer one. they both have teh same function, heck the cheaper one may even be more practical since it's machine washable. But no-one but you cares.

All the mac hate always makes me realize what a lack of understanding there is amongst the "gaming community" of the real world.

You clearly do not understand the real world if you think that everyone will oversell anything they can to you, and that finding alternatives that save you money without sacrificing (increasing, in fact) functionality is not caused by a lack of understanding.

Enjoy going through life overpaying for anything that anyone asks you to.

 

[Kpt._Rob]

I really love my Mac. Maybe it's just because the last computer I had was a monolithic HP running Windows Vista, and so an etch-a-sketch would have been a good computer by comparison. What I can say is that my Mac is really reliable, very fast, and easy to use. The interface will throw you a bit at first, but it's pretty intuitive and I've come to find that I like it a lot better than any of the Windows based computers I've ever used.

I would note here though, that I'm not a computer gamer. I've never had the money to be able to afford it, so I've stuck with console gaming. If you are a computer gamer, the mac might not be for you (though it can play Minecraft, and really, what else could you possibly want from a computer?), but for most non-gaming stuff it's a pretty solid computer. Also, because Apple has grown so much in popularity as of late, a lot more programs are Mac compatible. There may be specific programs you can't run, but if nothing else, you can usually find a different program that'll do the same thing which will run on a Mac.

As a final note, if you really want to run Windows only stuff, you can install a Windows OS on your Mac with boot camp if you partition the hard drive.

 

[Double A]

Normally, I wouldn't be interested in macs, but it seems my school may be forcing us to pay for macbooks, whether we want them or not. So can someone give me some pros about a macbook, and why I should pay $400 to rent one for 2 years.

Here's a great one: your hard drive will probably die in 4 years. Another one is they can't play most computer games. Oh, and they cost a lot, and are fragile. Their delete key works as backspace, so you really don't have one. They don't have Paint, many downloadable applications don't work unless they are specifically for Macs, and all the shortcuts are different.

I bet you want one already.

 

[Romblen]

Pros of a mac...hmmm

You could paint it black and try to convince yourself that the mac is actually worth something.

That's all I got.

 

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

I can't sell you on the MacBook. I can sure sell you against it, though.

Oh, this should be fun.

It's expensive for the components you get.

Somewhat true. If you only look at raw numbers like CPU/GPU/RAM, definitely very true. When you include stuff like build quality (they could be improved in some ways, but they're generally a lot sturdier than your average cheapo laptop, and you'll similarly pay extra for something comparable like a ThinkPad) and size (which I don't care too much about, but some people seem to), the difference is smaller. The big problem is that they have very limited options in terms of the models they offer and not a ton of customization. If what you want happens to match up exactly with what they're selling, you'll have a hard time finding something similar from someone else that's much cheaper. If you want a few things different, like you don't need feature X they include and would rather have feature Y, though, too bad.

Of course, that only applies to the US, for the most part. Apple rips you off beyond belief in many other parts of the world. I'm not sure if it's still the case, but it used to be cheaper to buy a plane ticket to NYC and buy an Apple computer there than to get the same thing locally in London.

Your operating system by default will not be able to run the vast majority of applications that most computer users use.

Most computer users use a web browser and Office these days, along with probably some kind of music/media player and maybe an IM client of some sort. Aside from Office (which does have a native Mac version), all of those exist and are free (and often even included) on just about every OS. Yes, there are many, many other things that people use computers for, but as much as I hate that it's ended up this way, the majority of people would be fine with just about anything for most stuff they do as long as they know which button makes the web browser happens. And other than games (which it really is atrocious for, and I won't pretend otherwise even with Steam helping slightly), there are plenty of native Mac apps to do almost anything other than very specific niche things.

You will be unlikely to use any special capacities of Mac OS X.

Most people are unlikely to use, or even be aware of, any special capacities of any OS. Even Windows has all sorts of wacky hidden features that hardly get used by anyone but rather advanced users.

If you really need something UNIX-based, you can just download Solaris for free from Sun Microsystems.

If you really need something with official UNIX certification...well, I don't know that I can think of a reason why you would unless you're working on something where some clueless non-technical supervisor/manager wrote it into the spec. There's almost no situation where UNIX-like (i.e. Linux/BSD) isn't more than good enough, and there's generally a lot more software and support more easily available than for Solaris (which is now Oracle's, since they bought Sun, and who knows if they'll even keep supporting it or if they'll kill it/let it die off). Not that there aren't situations where Solaris is appropriate, but it just seems like a weird suggestion.

In order to legally use those applications, you will have to spend a large amount of money on a Windows licence key. Being able to use Windows will take up a considerable amount of your hard drive space, and unlike a desktop, you aren't just going to be able to put an extra hard drive in there.

If you do need to run Windows, don't already have a license, and can't get away with a native app or WINE, yup, you do have to pay for it. Depending on what you're doing with it, though, the amount of space is not necessarily a big deal. I have a 10 GB XP image for occasionally testing some crap in VirtualBox (hi again, Sun/Oracle), which has been more than plenty. YMMV.

The computer is liable to get stolen a lot quicker than a conventional Windows-based laptop.

I'm curious about the actual numbers, but that wouldn't surprise me too much. See also: anything else with a high resale value.

The white case will attract more conspicuous scratches than a darker-coloured shell.

That's actually not been my experience. For a smooth/glossy finish, white tends to look better longer than black/dark colors, mostly because fingerprints and fine scratches don't show up as easily in the light. Both are crap compared to a matte finish, though, especially if it's dark, which may not be "ooh shiny", but it sure hides dirt and scuffs well. Stupid trendy shiny plastic.

While there are reasons why you might buy a MacBook, there are none - none - that apply to a person at secondary-level education. I'd rail like crazy against their ridiculous plans. You don't need a laptop for secondary education, let alone a MacBook. They're just not making any sense.

Now there's something I can agree with entirely. The whole situation seems pretty silly, but plenty of school districts in plenty of places have tried to justify similar things for the past several years, starting with the iBooks in Maine. Yeah, computers and technology are great, and people have to be familiar with them, and there are some useful things that can be done with them in education, but they don't magically fix or improve anything, and you could probably get a much better return for less money with decent teachers being allowed to teach effectively instead of forced to shoehorn laptops into things somehow or other.

Anyway, I say all of that as the owner of a MacBook...who's been seriously considering selling it and replacing it with something else for the past couple months. It has its good points and its bad ones. My sister and my girlfriend and several other friends of mine have been mostly very happy with theirs, and they range from "barely knows how to use a computer" to "highly paid software developer who spends dozens of hours a week working on it". I know just as many people across just as wide a range who can't stand them for various reasons, too. It really depends on what your needs are and whether it meets them. My needs have been slowly drifting away from what Apple sells, but it's so hard to find anything anyone else makes that suits me better and doesn't suck in some different way, so I currently have an uneasy truce between my MacBook, my Win7 desktop, and servers running Linux, all three of which are good in some ways and piss me off in others. So it goes. Heh.

 

[Canid117]

Just buy a PC and get OS X so you can run dual OS.

What kind of retards run your school?

 

[KazTheKing]

The touchpad is pretty good. That is all.

 

[fix-the-spade]

Normally, I wouldn't be interested in macs, but it seems my school may be forcing us to pay for macbooks, whether we want them or not. So can someone give me some pros about a macbook, and why I should pay $400 to rent one for 2 years.

What kind of course you doing?

To be honest a Macbook is a pretty sucky piece of hardware with a shiny shiny interface glued to the top that only works for a select few products.

BUT.

If you're school is giving you one it's probably to make sure they have no compatability issues and everyone has the same gear. It'll also mean you have someone else to lean on for any maintanence that may or may not need doing.
They're pretty good for creative software packages too, but for what they cost you can usually buy a bitchin' PC that will do the same things even better.

See what kind of Mac they want to give you, if it's a good current one $400 for two years isn't a bad deal. If it's a crappy old one ask them to explain their decision to force one on you in detail and threaten to buy your own $400 laptop if they can't justify it to you. If the Mac's anything over 3-4 years old a $400 laptop will outstrip it by miles.

 

[ActionDan]

I can't give you any pros, for I despise Macbooks in all forms. I can show you this though!

http://bit.ly/92MQf3

I love this comparison. I show it to everyone who says that "Mac's are the best computers ever"

 

[Omega Pirate]

I got a Macbook pro 13', which I use mostly to surf the internet and word proses documents. I love the touchpad on this thing, it is the most epic thing on this computer. The design is what I like, the software is another issue.

 

[Sneaklemming]

Normally, I wouldn't be interested in macs, but it seems my school may be forcing us to pay for macbooks, whether we want them or not. So can someone give me some pros about a macbook, and why I should pay $400 to rent one for 2 years.

The plus side of this is that macs are built to last only two years, so its a bargin really.

Also for the selling point? You can use boot camp and install windows 7/vista/xp on your mac, and keep it subtle enuff that your school probably wont realise.

 

[Beyond D espair]

For my College program I was forced to get a Mac laptop and had to get Parallels just to run windows programs on it for the course.

At first I detested the very idea of getting a mac, but after the first month, I changed just about every negative opinion I had about it. I really like the touch pad and the interface was extremely easy to get use to. It's not so great for games, but Steam made things a lot better.

I absolutely cannot recommend parallels for it though. If you have to run a windows based program on your mac, Bootcamp is pretty much the best solution I've found.

Parallels on the mac just made me hate my mac and my life...

Aha! I knew you liked it! *sob sob sob*

Come on, you knew that already. (But don't cry. I know you like the mac too)

 

[Mcface]

Dont.. if you want overpriced, get an alienware. at least its useful!

 

[Thaliur]

WeIl, I recently bought a 280? ASUS netbook. My girlfriend has a MacBook (from the time when Macs were still quite good), so I know both sides.

First, hardware comparison:

Granted, her screen is a lot bigger than that of my netbook (of course, it's a netbook after all), but in summer we regularly sat outside when studying. Well, we tried at least. I could read my screen mostly fine, could see anything I wanted on it. On her screen, she could see... her face, and a portion of sky. I personally like seeing her face, but looking at her doesn't really advance knowledge of electronics.

I often use my netbook in lectures, be it to write stuff down, have a quick look at something on the web, checking mails/calendar... whatever.
It perfectly fits in my bag, hers is quite bulky (again, netbooks were designed to do that, so no problem there).
The battery lasts for about 6 to 7 hours of normal use (not counting prolonged periods of standby, and definitely not counting hibernation), while hers lasts about one and a half, with a (according to the label) higher battery capacity.

Her MacBook has built-in Bluetooth. On the other hand mine has three USB Ports as opposed to two on hers, and I can easily sacrifice one for a 6? miniature bluetooth antenna and still have as many USB ports as her MacBook. Also, she is unable to copy files directly from a USB memory stick or cardreader to her USB harddrive, because the ports are so close together that she can't plug in both at the same time.

Our keyboards are basically the same size, only I have more buttons/commands. For example, she has no proper "del" key, I can switch my WLAN on or off quickly by pressing a command key, she has to use that taskbar thingy. She is constantly annoyed by her touchpad doing stuff when she accidentally touches it while typing, I have a small button right in front of my screen to just disable my touchpad completely if I want to.
Did I mention that my touchpad is also multi-touch capable and actually has two physical buttons, and when I enable tapping I get single-finger tapping for left, two-finger-tapping for right, and three-finger-tapping for middle button instead of using weird hotkey-like combinations.

My netbook has a proper VGA port, something I actually looked out for. When she wanted to attach her MacBook to her TV (which is VGA compatible), she first had to pay Apple another 30? to perform a basic function any other notebook can do straight away. We didn't pay the 30?, but found the same kind of cable with a slightly more pragmatic design (still white, but not polished, and with screws to fix a VGA cable to it) for 8?, which was pretty reasonable.

Well, that's all of the hardware differences that come to my mind right now.


Now, the software (basically MacOS vs. Windows, of course, with matching other software, again, so you might want to skip that):

When I want to launch a program, I tap my touchpad with three fingers (or hold Shift-Ctrl) and draw a symbol on it (for example, an @ for the default mail program, and I can assign letter, simple geometric shapes and numbers to basically as many other programs as I have symbols left) and it starts. For other programs, I can use the new taskbar, or the built-in shortcuts for pinned programs (Win+position of the program), and of course, there's the start menu, and in case I don't want to browse through that I can just type the name.
She has the amazing choice between the Dock and the "applications" folder, or spotlight if necessary.

Speaking of applications:
On Windows, an application usually brings an uninstaller with it, that can be used to remove the application, its registry entries, any context menu items, and if desired also any associated settings files and whatever was stored in user profiles.
On the Mac, you can just delete the application from the applications folder, and be rid of it. Leaving behind everything the program ever put into your user folder, your library and whatever places are available to put stuff in. We tried to uninstall a preloaded virus scanner demo from her Macbook, to install an actually free one. It took us about one hour, and I'm pretty sure there's still something left, but at least the system doesn't try to start the tray icon on boot anymore.
Actually, these problems also happen when uninstalling Apple software from a Windows PC, it'
s really difficult to remove them completely.

Also, most settings are easily available in Windows, on Mac we had to dig through lots of unintuitively-labelled settings just to get her Wireless LAN working properly. Same for printer setup, and basically anything that didn't involve only Apple products.

Mac OS has no proper maintenance tools. Of course "Macs don't need to defragment, they do it automatically". Yes, they do it automatically for files below a certain size (i Think it was 20MB), so if you have a heavily fragmented movie on your harddisk, you can definitely expect playback trouble because of the AMAZINGLY FAST MacBook harddrive, and you can't do anything about it. Also, no defragmentation means no optimization either, so your files are evenly distributed across your harddisk unless you keep care not to fill it up too much.
Also, Mac OS does support FAT32, one of the most fragmentation-prone file systems still in use, and you can do nothing to defragment that.
A real hard disk error scan tool like chkdsk seems to be missing too, at least I couldn't find one. All that seems to be possibly on Mac OS is "repair the permissions". Seriously, how robust can a system be that has to repair file permissions occasionally? And of course, there's also a problem with FAT32 drives. My girlfriend has her USB harddisk running in FAT32 for increased compatibility (or actually, any compatibility at all), and I had to have my computer repair it a few times already, because her housemates regularly managed to blow out a fuse when cooking, cutting power for her room (OK, actually the wiring in that house was crazy too. I can't imagine any good reason to put the kitchen and the other rooms on the same fuse).

Speaking of compatibility: Windows can use any location it can write to as a backup destination. Mac OS requires "Time Machine" compatible drives, so an NAS, to support Mac OS backups, has to create an image with HFS file system, mount that, and make it available on the network, while a simple shared folder is sufficient for Windows (which also uses an image file, but creates it by itself).

When I write stuff to a USB drive, only the files I wanted to copy get transferred there. When she does it, you end up with a bunch of special Mac OS files on the drive as well. This also applies to archives, which can be really annoying. Apparently these files are used to store Mac OS specific data that can't be stored on FAT32, and simply asking the user if they want to copy the files without these filesystem-specific attributes, like in Windows, seems to be too user-friendly.

Also, Windows can seemlessly integrate shared folders and to an extent even FTP and other servers into the interface. On Mac OS, I still haven't found a way to do something similar.

Speaking of network: Windows by default accesses any DLNA-compatible media server on the network. In tzhe case of Windows Media Player even acrosss the internet (as shown in the Win7 ads), iTunes seems to be limited to iTunes-specific servers, as far as I can see, at least I was never able to access a DLNA server using iTunes. And of course, iTunes servers can't be accessed by DLNA devices either, so basically, if you want to watch iTunes stuff on a TV set, you need to buy the also ridiculously overpriced AppleTV, or similarly overpriced adapters for your MacBook.

Also, Microsoft doesn't charge for service packs. As far as I know Apple progressed to OSX SP7 by now...


As for the "stylish and impressive" argument: Some people in our lectures use MacBooks during classes, and concerning computer-related comments, I hear "Hey, you still got battery life left?" or "Cool, you start programs with gestures?" a lot more often than something like "cool, a Mac!". The ASUS is white and shiny too, by the way.


Seriously, the only thing i can recommend about this whole affair is:
Try to talk your school council into thinking rationally.