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Should i get a MacBook Pro for uni?

i've been told countless times you need a good solid laptop for the duration you are at university and a Macbook Pro laptop is solid, fast, good quality and will last me ages. should i get one since i can afford it? its around £900 for a 13 inch screen with student discount so im thinking i should get it. i've never had much luck with PC's in the past and i want to purchase a laptop once and for all. MacBook Pros have good reviews also. should i get one? is it worth it?

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Ive got one, if you can afford it go for it. Most people don't use the full capabilities of the Macbook Pro...Its a extremely beautiful machine, excellent build quality, very good battery life, reliable, fast and will last a lot longer than other laptops (my flatmate has had his Sony Vaio for 6-7 months and already its broken) also during July-September they usually do a back to school promotion (last year £65 iTunes card) and a £70 printer rebate! the only bad thing is that you may take some time to get used to the OS and its very expensive
I've got a MBP and love it, also you can get applecare for about 75% off with your uni card!

note: all the apple haters are going to come flooding in shortly.
Reply 3
Original post by killercow292
Ive got one, if you can afford it go for it. Most people don't use the full capabilities of the Macbook Pro...Its a extremely beautiful machine, excellent build quality, very good battery life, reliable, fast and will last a lot longer than other laptops (my flatmate has had his Sony Vaio for 6-7 months and already its broken) also during July-September they usually do a back to school promotion (last year £65 iTunes card) and a £70 printer rebate! the only bad thing is that you may take some time to get used to the OS and its very expensive


fantastic! i've currently got £1000 exactly for my MacBook and i'll probably purchase it when i start uni in September and take advantage of the offers
If you really feel the need to, but do remember you can get a Windows laptop that will outperform a macbook for around £500. I do like the build quality of mac's, but I could not justify spending £1000 when you can get something that's better for half the price.

I'll put it in easy context for you to decide. If you want something for Surfing the web, music/videos and word processing - the standard stuff, then just get a decent laptop. If you want something to edit film, make music, basically 'create' things with relative ease then that's the only real advantage of buying a Mac (You can do all of this on Windows as well but the programmes aren't as accessible). People can disagree, and state that they're better than laptops, but the fact is they're not; they're a premium product and you're paying for the brand, not the computer itself. People will also recommend them for their personal justification of spending £1000.

If you're sensible you'll get something like this:http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/asus-a53e-sx1339s-15-6-laptop-red-11884685-pdt.html?intcmpid=display~RR~~11884685 which is slightly better than the MBP and is only £550. If you have more money than sense you'll follow the crowd and buy something that does not represent the price tag. This is coming from someone who actually has a bit of computing knowledge and has built desktops from scratch - Don't ever buy something because it looks 'nice'.

Edit: Here comes the negs from apple fanboys :colone:
(edited 11 years ago)
Reply 5
You can buy something, like suggested, that at first glance appears better than a MBP at half the price, but you won't be still using it when you graduate.

An genuinely equivalent windows laptop generally costs about the same as the mac stuff. The whole apple range is not expensive when compared fairly, they just don't make low end products.

It's up to you whether you buy a mac or not, but buy a decent laptop, spend £1k and it will last you a good 3+ years. If you buy the Mac it'll still be worth a fair bit too. I bought a MB in 2006 for £900, sold in 2010 for £400 and it wasn't in perfect condition due to use. The MB also worked flawlessly when sold too. I have also recently upgraded my windows laptop, my last Panasonic cost a fair bit in 2008, changed it last month (well work did) but there was nothing wrong with it after 4 years of daily usage. Buy good quality, and it will last. Of course looking after it helps too :tongue:

If you do buy a Mac, I'd recommend buying online from a computer on campus, you get better discounts and free 3 year warranty.
Reply 6
Original post by Sapphire33
i've been told countless times you need a good solid laptop for the duration you are at university and a Macbook Pro laptop is solid, fast, good quality and will last me ages. should i get one since i can afford it? its around £900 for a 13 inch screen with student discount so im thinking i should get it. i've never had much luck with PC's in the past and i want to purchase a laptop once and for all. MacBook Pros have good reviews also. should i get one? is it worth it?


yea!
Personally, I bought a mac last year and I love it, sure I don't use it to it's full extent but I still know its a solid and good machine...what I will say is sometimes I do wish I had bought a gaming desktop, as the total package including a good monitor is the same amount as your average mac :colondollar:

But still I know it's going to outlast all my friends who bashed me for having it, and anyone who
has it in for apple has never had some hands on with the os...makes microsoft look like playdough :tongue:
Reply 8
Original post by Sapphire33
i've been told countless times you need a good solid laptop for the duration you are at university and a Macbook Pro laptop is solid, fast, good quality and will last me ages. should i get one since i can afford it? its around £900 for a 13 inch screen with student discount so im thinking i should get it. i've never had much luck with PC's in the past and i want to purchase a laptop once and for all. MacBook Pros have good reviews also. should i get one? is it worth it?


I love mine and have rarely made a better spending decision than buying it - not just that it's beautiful to look at, makes work so much more pleasant - also that it's very fast, reliable, integrates so well with iphone/ipad etc.

Glad for you that you can afford such nice things - go for it. :smile:
yeah, be a rebel
Reply 10
Unless you are doing an art or music course or something like that, no (although imho even then its debatable whether you actually NEED one). The several hundred pound difference between a Mac and a Dell/HP/whatever does not justify it, espcially when you are a student, you want to stretch your money as far as possible. I got my Dell for about £400, whereas I'm sure a comparable Mac would have cost over a grand. I'm sure I will get voted down by Apple fanboys, but the difference in price is really not justifiable.
Reply 11
Not a fan of apple products but still brought a MBP under student discount and to be honest its working pretty well. If you have the funds dont think twice, just buy it!
As somebody just approaching the end of their first year I know a great many people who were in your position and chose either mac or laptop. I can happily tell you now you'll be fine either way. The extra cash people spend on the mac definitely shows (they don't go out as much) but they're still defending their purchase so as long as they're happy I guess it's fine. People with windows laptops are also happily working away with few problems and also benefit from our universities IT system being windows 7 based.

I have a powerful desktop and a small, cheap, laptop for in uni that, together, just about matches how much you're planning to spend on a mac. being able to run any program (game :P) instantly on a massive screen with 5.1 surround while still being able to access the internet and whip up documents with relative speed when I'm out is just perfect imo. If I could change this set up though I'd have gone for a tablet instead of a laptop. This is about the only situation in which I could advocate shelling out for one :P

In summary, which ever you go for you don't need to worry about it being the wrong one, although as a student you should be seriously considering saving money. £500 is more than I'll ever have at one time for the next 5 or so years.
Reply 13
Original post by Sapphire33
i've been told countless times you need a good solid laptop for the duration you are at university and a Macbook Pro laptop is solid, fast, good quality and will last me ages. should i get one since i can afford it? its around £900 for a 13 inch screen with student discount so im thinking i should get it. i've never had much luck with PC's in the past and i want to purchase a laptop once and for all. MacBook Pros have good reviews also. should i get one? is it worth it?


Why do you need a laptop? What are you going to be using it for?
Reply 14
If you really want an Apple computer, surely the macbook air is a better buy.
I am getting one because my current 13 inch Macbook is 5yrs old, I fancy an updgrade (both laptop and OS wise, my current is on OSX Lepoard) and the screen is partly cracked. So I am going to get a 13inch MacBook Pro with a student discount once I know which Uni I am going to along with Office 2011 for Mac (need Office to do 99% of my work on)
Just get a decent Windows laptop, half the price and better performance. :smile:

All required software can easily be downloaded for free or bought cheaply through student discounts.
Original post by zara55
Ignore all the nay-sayers - MacBook or MacBook Air are both brilliant and streets ahead of the competition. Jealousy motivates a lot of the people who dislike Mac on TSR.


I assume you have no idea what you're talking about as that's a load of nonsense. In terms of 'competition' as I said earlier you can get a laptop with comparable performance for half the price. 'Competition' for Macbooks would be at the £1000 mark if you do a fair test, and Windows laptops at this price wipe the floor with Macbooks.

Lenovo's as an example, quality built computers, far more reliable than Mac's, for around £900 (less than an ENTRY level MBP) You can get an i7 processor running at 2.7 ghz which has a potential boost to 3.4ghz if you know what you're doing. A Mac around the same price (apparently 'streets ahead of the competition') will be running an i5 at 2.4ghz... (At this point you're probably already lost but I shall continue) The lenovo has double the RAM at 8GB, a larger hard drive at 750GB compared to 500GB, a blue ray player and a far, far superior graphics card in the form of a Radeon 6650m (with 2GB dedicated RAM) which has twice the graphics power of a Intel 3000 that the MBP has. All the while still cheaper than the Mac.

As you can see it is hardly streets ahead, the exact opposite tbh. To get even near the performance of this you'd need to spend around £1500 on a Mac, but then you could spend about £200 extra and get a different Windows laptop that will wipe the floor with that.

I'm hardly jealous either. If I really wanted I could of bought a Mac. I instead built a desktop that is far, far superior to a Mac for only £600 which can play or run anything I want, and when somethings outdated, I simply take it out and put something new in... All the while I have an extra £400 in my bank to spend on things that are actually useful in life.

Macbooks and airs are good computers, but they're not worth the price. 50% of the price is the Brand alone.
(edited 11 years ago)
Reply 18
People still trotting out the 'you can get a Windows laptop for 50% less than a MacBook' line?

Wow, I forgot this was pre-2006.

Find me an Ultrabook laptop which is 50% less than the Macbook Air? Go on, I challenge you. Oh, and not one which has had it's price gutted by the imminent release of Ivybridge ULV next month. You won't find one because until the last 5 months Windows manufacturers have found it /impossible/ to compete with Apple's Air price range.

And most these £400 Dell laptops are a different ballpark. They might have the same specifications but the battery takes a significant hit and are often twice as thick, and double the weight. This isn't aesthetics, this is basic portability going down the pisser at the expense of creating a reasonably specced laptop but on a low low budget.

Come back to this thread in one months time after WWDC when Apple will almost definitely have a retina display Macbook Pro out. Then try trot out the line you can get an identical laptop for half the price.

I'm not going to dispute that you pay a little extra for Apple, but that's the trade off you get for a fantastically designed, amazing customer service and the superior OSX compared to Windows. You need to weigh up whether paying a bit extra for it (which for the record, really isn't 50%). The only Windows laptops I would recommend are Lenovo and Thinkpads purely for their build quality. Thinkpads are equally as expensive as Apple's Macbook range. The rest of the cheap Windows (the likes of Acer and HP) are shoddy build quality and it will packing in within 3 years.

Edit:

Original post by charlie9872
x,


Cool battery life compared to the MBP, cool resolution compared to the MBP, cool dedicated GPU...oh wait. Nice dimensions too.

Not a fair comparison to the 15" Macbook Pro. Hell I do actually agree that the 15" Macbook Pro is priced too high. It's the 13" where Apple excel, and it's no surprise that the 13" MBP and Air make up the bulk of their sales.

Stop comparing 13" laptop prices to 15" laptops too. If you're clued up you know damn well that high powered 13" laptops are more expensive than their 15" counterparts.
(edited 11 years ago)
Original post by PVisitors


Cool battery life compared to the MBP, cool resolution compared to the MBP, cool dedicated GPU...oh wait. Nice dimensions too.

Not a fair comparison to the 15" Macbook Pro. Hell I do actually agree that the 15" Macbook Pro is priced too high. It's the 13" where Apple excel, and it's no surprise that the 13" MBP and Air make up the bulk of their sales.

Stop comparing 13" laptop prices to 15" laptops too. If you're clued up you know damn well that high powered 13" laptops are more expensive than their 15" counterparts.


1.) An extra £400 isn't worth 4 hours extra battery life, when a device called a 'plug' is nearly always accessible.

2.) Fair enough, the screens on Mac's are unmatched, but the lenovo I Was on about has an LED backlit screen that does the job perfectly. Again, not worth the extra money for the screen of a Mac.

3.) The Mac's as standard have intel 3000 graphics which is horrible and can't run new releases. The 6650m in the Lenovo is capable of running BF3 at medium settings. You have to upgrade to get the 6750m or 6770m and are only available in the higher end 15inch or 17inch versions.

4.) Who gives a **** about the 'dimensions' of a laptop. I buy computers in relation to what would give me the best bang for my buck, I really couldn't care about the size of it if I can get something considerably better for less.

I was doing all my comparisons to the 13inch as well, I was saying that the 13inch was still overpriced in relation to anything similar in the market.

I'm not saying they're bad. They're very good, and they have fantastic build quality - but they are simply too much money and very overrated I'm only voicing my opinion, trying to save people some money.
(edited 11 years ago)

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