What's up with all the macbooks at uni?

Reply 20

Jammy Duel

21

Original post by MinnieD

My mum bought mine actually so I guess she's a hipster?

Posted from TSR Mobile

Of her own accord or because of an implication that you wanted one? I somewhat doubt it would be the first.

Reply 21

MinnieD

9

Original post by Jammy Duel

Of her own accord or because of an implication that you wanted one? I somewhat doubt it would be the first.

Yes of her own accord actually. I asked for a new laptop and said the choice was up to her because I wanted a surprise on Christmas morning.

Posted from TSR Mobile

Reply 22

Loshie

I currently use a macbook pro. I bought it around a year a go and got 15% student discount. On top of that I got a £70 apple store giftcard for free as part of the back to school promotion. I sold the card for around £50 so my £1000 mac ended up costing me £800. Since then I have upgraded the stock ram to 16gb and replaced the main HDD with an SSD. I also removed the optical drive and replaced it with an SSD. I have the two SSDs in a raid configuration. Basically I turns on in less than 20 seconds and is very snappy. Of corse gaming is not really an option but it should last through uni.

Reply 23

Pro Crastination

19

Original post by Loshie

I currently use a macbook pro. I bought it around a year a go and got 15% student discount. On top of that I got a £70 apple store giftcard for free as part of the back to school promotion. I sold the card for around £50 so my £1000 mac ended up costing me £800. Since then I have upgraded the stock ram to 16gb and replaced the main HDD with an SSD. I also removed the optical drive and replaced it with an SSD. I have the two SSDs in a raid configuration. Basically I turns on in less than 20 seconds and is very snappy. Of corse gaming is not really an option but it should last through uni.

How did you get those replacements fitted? I'm assuming it was another firm, not apple? Was that the mid 2012 edition?

Reply 24

Loshie

Original post by Pro Crastination

How did you get those replacements fitted? I'm assuming it was another firm, not apple? Was that the mid 2012 edition?

Yes it is the mid 2012 edition. I did the replacements myself at the expense of voiding my warranty. The hard drive is very easy to replace. All you need is a small phillips screwdriver and a torx screwdriver. The replacement optical drive cost me around £20 and acts as a sata adaptor. It was more complicated as I had to remove some extra parts to remove the DVD drive. The whole process took around 30 mins and then I did a clean install of OSX.

Reply 25

UniMastermindBOSS

19

Original post by Loshie

I currently use a macbook pro. I bought it around a year a go and got 15% student discount. On top of that I got a £70 apple store giftcard for free as part of the back to school promotion. I sold the card for around £50 so my £1000 mac ended up costing me £800. Since then I have upgraded the stock ram to 16gb and replaced the main HDD with an SSD. I also removed the optical drive and replaced it with an SSD. I have the two SSDs in a raid configuration. Basically I turns on in less than 20 seconds and is very snappy. Of corse gaming is not really an option but it should last through uni.

So you paid £800 for a laptop, and then you still had to pay extra to turn it into something decent :confused:

Reply 26

Loshie

Original post by UniMastermindBOSS

So you paid £800 for a laptop, and then you still had to pay extra to turn it into something decent :confused:

Not necessarily. The stock macbook is still a good machine however it was a little sluggish to me. I went overkill with the SSD raid and the 16gb ram. For the average person the performance should be perfectly fine. I admit that £800 is definitely a large price to pay for a laptop however I do prefer the operating system over windows. Also the aluminium unibody design is very durable and it has lasted for the time I have had it.

Reply 27

ihavemooedtoday

17

13" screen, 3.5 lb, 10 hours battery life, for about the same price as comparable ultrabooks with only 2 of those 3 things.

That's pretty much the reason for me. I never found anything comparable on the PC side.

2.4 GHz i5, Intel Iris (best integrated graphics solution out there right now), and 700 MB/s SSD don't hurt either.

I got the 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM version for $1499 (~£900). Wouldn't exactly call that overpriced.

Original post by UniMastermindBOSS

Some people don't have a clue when it comes to technology, that's all.

True. I know very little about technology. I have only been a professional software developer for a few years, now mostly do Linux kernel driver development and designing embedded systems, and having used all 3 major desktop OSes extensively for years.

Reply 28

Camoxide

14

3 year warranty, light, small and pretty durable.

Reply 29

simon_g

16

Original post by Mike_123

Once you go mac, you never go back

unless, of course, you will need something good, with good build quality and well planned design, and with sane security offered by OS. ah, do not forget about sane warranty options (omission of NBD warranty by default in hardware worth >£1K is a pure stupidity).

Reply 30

chriswebster94

1

Original post by ihavemooedtoday

13" screen, 3.5 lb, 10 hours battery life, for about the same price as comparable ultrabooks with only 2 of those 3 things.

That's pretty much the reason for me. I never found anything comparable on the PC side.

2.4 GHz i5, Intel Iris (best integrated graphics solution out there right now), and 700 MB/s SSD don't hurt either.

I got the 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM version for $1499 (~£900). Wouldn't exactly call that overpriced.

Personally I think that is a bit overpriced - admittedly the SSD is faster than a HDD, but I got my laptop with a 2.67GHz i5, 4GB ram, 15.6" screen, and a 750GB HDD for ~£450. I spent roughly another £150 on a blu-ray drive, 1080p screen, and another 4GB of ram, and it's the best laptop I've ever had.

Reply 31

ihavemooedtoday

17

Original post by chriswebster94

Personally I think that is a bit overpriced - admittedly the SSD is faster than a HDD, but I got my laptop with a 2.67GHz i5, 4GB ram, 15.6" screen, and a 750GB HDD for ~£450. I spent roughly another £150 on a blu-ray drive, 1080p screen, and another 4GB of ram, and it's the best laptop I've ever had.

Yeah it really depends on what kind of things you look for in a laptop. For me, battery life and weight is by far the most important, and I didn't find any PC laptop in that same league.

That SSD is much faster than even most/all high end SSDs found in PC laptops, though the speed difference is probably not noticeable 99% of the time, since they are all more than fast enough.

I personally don't care about the 2560x1600 screen (1080p is way more than good enough for me), but some people do.

Also, 15" laptops are usually cheaper than 13" laptops in general for some bizarre reason.

If you just want fast CPU and fast discrete GPU, Macbooks are obviously very bad choices.

Reply 32

Mike_123

18

Original post by simon_g

unless, of course, you will need something good, with good build quality and well planned design, and with sane security offered by OS. ah, do not forget about sane warranty options (omission of NBD warranty by default in hardware worth >£1K is a pure stupidity).

Haters gon hate

Reply 33

Mad Vlad

19

Original post by wyntersugar

I'm only considering getting one becuase it makes me feel more "studenty".

What the hell does this even mean?

I despair.

Reply 34

Tai Ga

18

dear lord we even have computer elitism now? :facepalm2:

Get what you wanna get OP. Don't worry about other people's choices.

Reply 35

SmaugTheTerrible

15

Original post by UniMastermindBOSS

Some people don't have a clue when it comes to technology, that's all.

Original post by Iqbal007

Also, Mac's do get viruses just like Windows OS, etc.............to be fair you just need some common sense to not get any viruses on a computer of any kind

Yes looooool

I feel like techies think just because a person has a mac they don't know much about computers.

I would say I know a fair amount and still chose a Macbook Air simply because its an all round great laptop. A windows laptop might give me some extra power and be a little cheaper but as a student I would gladly pay a little extra and compromise on power to get a long battery life.

Don't forget that a windows machine that comes close to a mac (ultra book for example) would probably cost more and have less power. The Airs are plenty for gaming. Heck I can play Skyrim on mine without lag.

Reply 36

chriswebster94

1

Original post by ihavemooedtoday

Yeah it really depends on what kind of things you look for in a laptop. For me, battery life and weight is by far the most important, and I didn't find any PC laptop in that same league.

You have a point there, my laptop struggles to last more than four hours on battery (the entire thing is two years old, so that will affect battery life, but still). If anything, I suppose a slightly less powerful processor might have boosted battery life a little.

Reply 37

ihavemooedtoday

17

Original post by chriswebster94

You have a point there, my laptop struggles to last more than four hours on battery (the entire thing is two years old, so that will affect battery life, but still). If anything, I suppose a slightly less powerful processor might have boosted battery life a little.

Yeah I am just a bit nuts about battery life haha. My previous laptop from 5 years ago was 13", 4 lb, with 12 hours battery life. The Core 2 Solo 1.4 GHz (ULV) was just a little too slow to handle... I also had a 250 MB/s SSD to go with it, and that computer was actually bottlenecked by the CPU in day-to-day usage... which is very uncommon, in a bad way. It would literally take days to transcode a longer movie.

On modern CPUs, processor speed actually doesn't affect battery life too much since they spend most of the time in very low power states.

I am not sure about the lowest power state for Haswells, but Core 2's would always run at 800 MHz when you are just browsing or typing up a document, whether it's a 2 GHz CPU or a 3 GHz CPU.

They only scale up when needed, and since for CPUs of the same design, P = cfv^2 (f = frequency, v = voltage, c = some constant), faster CPUs only take more power when they are actually running something CPU intensive. Though that still doesn't mean they will take more power overall, because they can finish the job sooner and go back to low power state sooner...

* OK, strictly technically, the above is not absolutely true, since every chip has different amount of leakage current (hence power consumption) at the same voltage. Though usually chips with high leakage can run at the same speed with a lower voltage, and chip makers do calibrate each chip to get the optimal V-F curve, so in the end, different chips will go to the same lowest frequency at different voltages, but end up consuming about the same amount of power.

And then it gets even more interesting when temperature variations are taken into account, as well as chip aging, etc.

It's all very interesting stuff, unfortunately, most of that knowledge is still under NDA, since chip makers do all these experiments, but want to use their results to gain an edge over their competitors, they never publish this kind of things.

Reply 38

Markg125

13

Don't get me wrong, they have their downsides. But I like mine and I will continue to buy Mac until I find a reason not too. Especially windows 8 out, I hate it!

Reply 39

Iqbal007

19

Original post by adamsmithqm

I feel like techies think just because a person has a mac they don't know much about computers.

I would say I know a fair amount and still chose a Macbook Air simply because its an all round great laptop. A windows laptop might give me some extra power and be a little cheaper but as a student I would gladly pay a little extra and compromise on power to get a long battery life.

Don't forget that a windows machine that comes close to a mac (ultra book for example) would probably cost more and have less power. The Airs are plenty for gaming. Heck I can play Skyrim on mine without lag.

I feel like people shouldn't make baseless assumptions on a single post by taking it out of context :rolleyes:

I only recommend Macs depending on peoples needs.

And I was simply pointing out a myth about Macs which someone stated, nothing wrong with that.

What's up with all the macbooks at uni?

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