laptop

[MJW]

Advice equired - my daughter is off to university this year to do a geography degree and will need a latop computer. The advice that I am asking is Mac or PC laptop - I was surprised to see in the Chris Atkinson Living the Dream documentary that Chris was using an Apple - admitedly I think it was for viewing video footage from recce / previous rallies.
You can rely on your predjuces and opinions, I will consider all and then make my own mind so please dont hold back.

[Roamy]

i bought one of the first mac powerbook g4s - a few years ago I bought a powerbook 17" and gave the g4 to my girlfriend. Both still work perfect and I have had no troubles at all. I can also work just fine in the windows world . My daughter uses a PC (Piece of Caca) which I detest. Macs are very easy to operate and all the software works. Now in the ivy league colleges mac is now over 50 % of the laptops i am told. Plus I don't see anyone trading their Mac in for a PC.

[Drew]

If the price is an issue, I'd rule out a mac immediately, they are extortionately expensive..

[Roamy]

Drew - You get what you pay for. A few hundred bucks can alleviate a lot of agro

[L5->R5/CR]

Advice equired - my daughter is off to university this year to do a geography degree and will need a latop computer. The advice that I am asking is Mac or PC laptop - I was surprised to see in the Chris Atkinson Living the Dream documentary that Chris was using an Apple - admitedly I think it was for viewing video footage from recce / previous rallies.
You can rely on your predjuces and opinions, I will consider all and then make my own mind so please dont hold back.

I love my macs, all 5 of them (although only 3 are still currently with me).

My G4 powerbook is still going strong 5 years later, although it has been retired to the auxillary machine.

For the main part, when you spec out a built to order/retail PC laptop the price is within 10-12% of the comparable apple unit.

That said, most Apple's run hardware that is toward the higher end of the spectrum which isn't necessarily always necessary for a lot of users.

Realistically, I'd look to run something other than Windows, especially on a campus (perhaps a Linux OS on a PC?). When I was in school I had a lot fewer computer related headaches than most of the students that were running windows machines, especially when it came to viruses, spyware, and other malicious programs.

[Daniel]

MJW You haven't mentioned your budget.

If you want your daughter to go on websites and preach about how great her laptop is then buy a Mac If you want to get the same result minus the preaching and save yourself some cash at the same time then buy a PC and buy one with Vista. Vista has been shown over the last year and a half to be a solid and stable OS.

Mac's do generally run more reliable hardware but you're paying a huuuuge amount for it and the difference in failure rates is only a matter of a few percent.

To get a comparable PC to the one I built earlier this year (prices have gone down since) I'd have to spend almost £1400 on the Apple UK site. I spent ~£750 on my PC which admittedly doesn't include the cost of a monitor but for £650 you'll be getting a pretty nice monitor plus my PC is mostly built from parts which have a 3 year or lifetime warranty so i get a far better warranty than I would with an Apple.

I could get another 2gb of memory, replace my aging graphics card, buy myself a 32" LCD TV (being silly) to run it on and still have change left over.

But anyway lets talk about laptops.

The cheapest MacBook in the UK is £699.

For that you get a 13" screen, 1gb of memory, a 2.1ghz Core 2 Duo processor, a CD/DVDRW drive, a 1 year warranty and a 120gb hard drive.

For 679 on the Dell UK site you can get something with a 2.4ghz Core 2 Duo processor, a 15.4" screen, 2gb of RAM, a proper non-integrated graphics card (very important), a 160gb hard drive and a 3 year warranty. With Dell's you can usually find discount codes online to get a little bit more off as well

So for £20 LESS you get MORE and you get the piece of mind knowing that it's got a 3 year on-site next business day warranty so you don't need to head into a sy Apple store to drop it off if it breaks.... they will come to you. I don't see any reason why a laptop which is treated well shouldn't last indefinitely (battery aside). I've built a few PC's in my time and all of them are still going strong up to 6 years later so don't be impressed when people say a 5 year old laptop is still going strong. There are very few moving parts in a laptop to go wrong so they do last.

P.S I looked up the price of a near identical Dell to the cheapest MacBook and it comes it at £429 so much for 10-12% within the price of a Mac

[MJW]

Thanks - I was looking at the £700 budget so PC laptop it is.

[L5->R5/CR]

P.S I looked up the price of a near identical Dell to the cheapest MacBook and it comes it at £429 so much for 10-12% within the price of a Mac

To be honest I've never attempted to price out a MacBook or an iMac. They aren't the level of computer that I use/suits my needs.

When I got my MacBookPro it was a 5% premium. My co-worker just ordered a Dell, he specced it out to be of at least the same level as the MacBookPro he wanted (but he decided he was going to run Linux and not OSX) and saved 7%.

The laptop we want for my girlfriend will be a premium of 8-10%. But this is all on the higher end, not on the basics.

It doesn't surprise me in the slightest that for cheap laptops PCs are much cheaper than cheap Macs. Doesn't make them better (or worse), but it does make them a better buy.

I prefer Macs, and working in imaging and video, a lot of the applications that I need for jobs are either Apple only, or are optimized on Apple computers. For me it just makes sense.

[Daniel]

To be honest I've never attempted to price out a MacBook or an iMac. They aren't the level of computer that I use/suits my needs.

When I got my MacBookPro it as a 5% premium. My co-worker just ordered a Dell, he specced it out to be of at least the same level as the MacBookPro he wanted (but he decided he was going to run Linux and not OSX) and saved 7%.

The laptop we want for my girlfriend will be a premium of 8-10%. But this is all on the higher end, not on the basics.

It doesn't surprise me in the slightest that for cheap laptops PCs are much cheaper then Macs. Doesn't make them better (or worse), but it does make them a better buy.

I prefer Macs, and working in imaging and video, a lot of the applications that I need for jobs are either Apple only, or are optimized on Apple computers.

Find a suitable MacBookPro on www.apple.com/uk and I'll find a Dell for a whole lot less

[carson32]