|
Typing on my new 13" Macbook Pro. I checked on the Airs, and after doing my research I figured this bad boy would do everything I needed. Thank you all for the advice though. Got welcomed to the Mac "family" by the genius dude.
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2012 04:32
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 20, 2024 00:54 |
|
|
Nooooooooooooooo. I have a 13" MBA (latest model) and a 13" MBP (work issued, latest model). The air is better than the pro in pretty much every way. If you put an SSD in the pro it'll be much nicer. The main problem is the screen though. The pro has significantly less resolution and the horrifying mirror screen. Side-by-side the Air has a much better screen for actual usability, and it's about halfway between 'gently caress why does my laptop have a mirror instead of a screen' and matte. I've even thought of buying another air and getting it cleared on my work network because I have to lug around the MBP for work (even outside work hours) and the air weight makes a big difference.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2012 17:18
|
|
|
The weight of the 13" Air is less but the size is still basically the same when you're taking it in/out of a bag. Especially when it's in a case of it's own. I recently went on a trip and took my 13" instead of my 11", and sort of regretted the decision. The longest time I was on a plane was just 4 hours, so the battery would have been okay either way. But getting it in/out of a tightly packed carry-on would have been a lot better with the smaller model. If it's your only computer and you don't have an external monitor for home, the higher resolution of the 13" is tough to beat. If the 13" MBP had the same screen I probably would have just stuck with what I had (13" 2011, 8GB, 160GB SSD) Spending another $300 for the Air over the Pro isn't worth it IMO. That's assuming you can get a refurb Pro or $999 one at Microcenter or somem other deal.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2012 17:30
|
|
|
Anyone that's been watching apple store - have upgraded minis been popping up at all? I need one with the radeon gpu. Also, what is Apple's policy on returning refurb stuff? I am setting up HDHomerun Prime and it hates my 2009 Mini, bsods ahoy. So I'm thinking of getting a 2011 mini and trying it to see how it functions. I got a deal where I can get 12 months 0% apr through my barclaycard if I go through Apple Store so whatever. My worries is if the 2011 BSODs the same that I'm boned and stuck with a pile of useless rear end.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2012 18:22
|
|
|
Bob Morales posted:Spending another $300 for the Air over the Pro isn't worth it IMO. That's assuming you can get a refurb Pro or $999 one at Microcenter or somem other deal. Looks like he bought it at the Apple Store, though.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2012 18:34
|
|
|
Another "duhhh good deal?" question... - 13" MBA, latest model - "Gently used" - 128 Gb / 4Gb - Box w/accessories and 3rd party case $1000, including $650 in Amazon GCs that I got for $70. Net cost to me... $420. Or should I wait? :-\
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2012 18:49
|
|
|
Qaz Kwaz posted:Another "duhhh good deal?" question... I wouldn't buy used, period. Spend the extra ~$200 and get a new one from Amazon. The no sales tax is a nice bonus. Edit: Maybe I seem like I'm taking too hard of a stance against used. I would probably buy from someone on SA Mart. I have no idea as to how reliable re-sellers are on Amazon. I think $200 is worth the peace of mind.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2012 19:15
|
|
|
illcendiary posted:I wouldn't buy used, period. Spend the extra ~$200 and get a new one from Amazon. The no sales tax is a nice bonus. Nothing really wrong with used, but only if you can: Get detailed pictures documenting any scuffs/scratches/dents See how many cycles the battery has had See the magsafe and make sure they don't wind it like a stupid gently caress causing damage to it or- Offer a 30 day return policy in case you aren't satisfied. -- Otherwise, I'd just try to spend the extra and get a brand new/refurb.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2012 19:23
|
|
|
Great, thanks for the help in deciding!
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2012 20:33
|
|
|
I'm planning on getting a MacBook soon, but I don't really know which model I should get. I'd mainly be using it as a replacement for my relatively dated desktop PC (Intel C2D, Geforce 250GTS, 320GB HDD). I'd like to use it for coding in Xcode, Eclipse and Unity, drawing in Photoshop and *maybe* some 3D modeling/rigging as well as some moderate gaming (Steam titles like TF2 and etc. though for the most part I only play/have time for indie games anymore). Basically everything I use my desktop for now, but in an Apple laptop. I'd really like to spring for a 17" Pro if only for the dedicated ATI graphics and larger screen real-estate but if I can get away with a slick (and much cheaper) Air that could give me all of the above at comparable performance I'd love that. From what I've seen on YouTube the Airs look pretty capable, but I'd like to future-proof as much as possible and buy something that will last a good while before having to upgrade.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2012 20:45
|
|
|
A few folks on my video/mograph team were talking today about what we should migrate to if the Mac Pro line goes away. This isn't to say that the current Westmere 12-core machines aren't an absolutely ample workstation, but a year or two down the line if the latest Xeons (8-core+ per cpu?) simply aren't available in an Apple workstation. We already have an Xsan investment on fiber and have retired one of our Apple storage arrays in favor of a Promise. We're also using a couple of Xserves (RIP) as render nodes. I argued that maaaaaybe whatever's in the future high-and iMac plus exterior Thunderbolt solutions could at least do what our current machines can do, but that could be a lot of shoehorning with external enclosures and such. One could argue that since software is more efficient you can do more with less, but with our workload we can really make use of every spare CPU core on the network. Basically, we used to trust Windows to a lot of our load-intensive creative software and it made us cry a lot. I don't want to return to that. edit: I haven't had the need, but is there any interaction with Airs and Target Disk Mode? Does Thunderbolt leverage this in any way, even with like a FW adapter? Will USB3 TDM on Macs? Here's hoping. kuskus fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Jan 6, 2012 |
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2012 20:53
|
|
|
For the price of a 17" Pro you can buy an 11" Air, iMac, and like a hundred cheeseburger baskets with fries and a Coke.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2012 20:54
|
|
|
A Bloody Crowbar posted:I'm planning on getting a MacBook soon, but I don't really know which model I should get. I'd mainly be using it as a replacement for my relatively dated desktop PC (Intel C2D, Geforce 250GTS, 320GB HDD). I'd like to use it for coding in Xcode, Eclipse and Unity, drawing in Photoshop and *maybe* some 3D modeling/rigging as well as some moderate gaming (Steam titles like TF2 and etc. though for the most part I only play/have time for indie games anymore). Basically everything I use my desktop for now, but in an Apple laptop. That said, your habits especially in regards to games aren't that demanding. Source engine-based games like TF2 and Portal 2 run great on Airs, and I doubt indie games require more than what the Source engine does. 3D modeling and rigging don't tend to push 3D graphics as hard as games do, so you're fine there. The only concern is storage space, but cloud solutions/external hard drives can help you there. If you're still undecided, find an Apple store or electronics store that has Apple products and try both of them out. wolffenstein fucked around with this message at 21:05 on Jan 6, 2012 |
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2012 21:01
|
|
|
kuskus posted:A few folks on my video/mograph team were talking today about what we should migrate to if the Mac Pro line goes away. This isn't to say that the current Westmere 12-core machines aren't an absolutely ample workstation, but a year or two down the line if the latest Xeons (8-core+ per cpu?) simply aren't available in an Apple workstation. We already have an Xsan investment on fiber and have retired one of our Apple storage arrays in favor of a Promise. We're also using a couple of Xserves (RIP) as render nodes. I argued that maaaaaybe whatever's in the future high-and iMac plus exterior ThunderBolt solutions could at least do what our current machines can do, but that could be a lot of shoehorning with external enclosures and such. One could argue that since software is more efficient you can do more with less, but with our workload we can really make use of every spare CPU core on the network. kuskus posted:edit: I haven't had the need, but is there any interaction with Airs and Target Disk Mode? Does Thunderbolt leverage this in any way, even with like a FW adapter? Will USB3 TDM on Macs? Here's hoping. wolffenstein fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Jan 6, 2012 |
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2012 21:04
|
|
|
wolffenstein posted:You really can't beat Mac minis for the performance price point and very small profile. It was years ago now, but there was a Microsoft blog entry detailing how they compiled Office for Mac builds using a Mac mini farm and Xgrid that was cheaper than an Xserve farm. To be fair, anything would have been cheaper than Xserves. I personally think the Mini is one of the worst values in Mac-land, right next to the 15" MBP. $599 for a 2GB machine? Even the $799 model is hard to swallow, when after you add the mouse, keyboard, and a quality display, you're almost at the price of the base iMac. If they made the base model $499 I could get behind that. I'll even add my own RAM.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2012 21:23
|
|
|
wolffenstein posted:You really can't beat Mac minis for the performance price point and very small profile. I'm sure that's true for many applications. If we wanted to get them on the existing fiber network connected to the Xsan (still lower latency for many items than GigE) we would need like, a Thunderbolt to PCIe box and a fiber card which may throw a wrench in a clean rack setup. Our Xserve nodes act like workstations and render complete scenes, so they're 8 core with 24GB of RAM. I guess we'd just need to re-think things a bit, but that's good suggestion. Oh Apple, people still have Pro needs.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2012 21:26
|
|
|
kuskus posted:I'm sure that's true for many applications. If we wanted to get them on the existing fiber network connected to the Xsan (still lower latency for many items than GigE) we would need like, a Thunderbolt to PCIe box and a fiber card which may throw a wrench in a clean rack setup. Our Xserve nodes act like workstations and render complete scenes, so they're 8 core with 24GB of RAM. I guess we'd just need to re-think things a bit, but that's good suggestion. Oh Apple, people still have Pro needs. Display-less iMacs would be neat and might fit in a rack.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2012 21:35
|
|
|
Bob Morales posted:Display-less iMacs would be neat and might fit in a rack. Welp, mocked it up and I think it's gonna work thanks guys. 
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2012 22:00
|
|
|
kuskus posted:Welp, mocked it up and I think it's gonna work thanks guys. Your missing some iPad action too, you know because they are thin so rack-mount really efficiently!
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2012 22:03
|
|
|
kuskus posted:Welp, mocked it up and I think it's gonna work thanks guys. Next OP picture found right here, fill all the air gaps with iOS devices until a mouse can't get through.
|
|
#
?
Jan 7, 2012 00:06
|
|
|
I take it the 20th Anniversary Mac is there in case you need to do some heavy processing?
|
|
#
?
Jan 7, 2012 00:16
|
|
|
Just picked up a 13" MBA for work. Now Im in the process of installing windows on it for work purposes. However I dont really need any storage other than for Windows and Office as most stuff is stored on our work server with the exception of a few documents and spreadsheets. Therefore could I get away with just having about a 50GB partition? (its the 256gb version). Also am I right in assuming I just use the windows version of office rather than the Mac version (which is mac OS?)
|
|
#
?
Jan 7, 2012 01:06
|
|
|
My wife and I are trying to upgrade her original (2006, I think; first Intel model) Mac Pro's graphics card. All that seems readily available via OWC and Apple themselves is a couple related ATI cards and an obscenely expensive high end NVidia. (Or the Mac-spec'd NVidia 8800 GT which seems really hard to find these days.) I need to do more research (scour xlr8yourmac, etc) but I'm curious if there are any well known resources for this sort of thing; how easy/reliable it is to buy regular PC-oriented GPUs and flash them to work with a Mac (not sure if that's the same process as Hackintosh people have to do, or I could go ask there); etc. We'll probably go the easy route and buy a Radeon HD 5770, but wanted to check here first.
|
|
#
?
Jan 7, 2012 01:07
|
|
|
Bob Morales posted:$599 for a 2GB machine? Even the $799 model is hard to swallow, when after you add the mouse, keyboard, and a quality display, you're almost at the price of the base iMac. If you already have nice KVM that you'd be replacing to get an iMac, though, the Mini is a nice deal. I got the 2.5 i5, added 8GB of RAM and an OWC SSD, and can't see how I would need anything faster. Plus, the Mini is only slightly harder to service than a Mac Pro, and infinitely easier than the iMac.
|
|
#
?
Jan 7, 2012 01:10
|
|
|
bitprophet posted:My wife and I are trying to upgrade her original (2006, I think; first Intel model) Mac Pro's graphics card. All that seems readily available via OWC and Apple themselves is a couple related ATI cards and an obscenely expensive high end NVidia. (Or the Mac-spec'd NVidia 8800 GT which seems really hard to find these days.) IIRC the answer is "very easy, but you'll never be able to see what's going on before you boot into OSX".
|
|
#
?
Jan 7, 2012 01:48
|
|
|
Fists Up posted:Just picked up a 13" MBA for work.
|
|
#
?
Jan 7, 2012 01:56
|
|
|
Or do boot camp and get vmware fusion so you have the choice of booting natively into windows or booting it as a vm inside osx.
|
|
#
?
Jan 7, 2012 02:00
|
|
|
Nitr0 posted:Or do boot camp and get vmware fusion so you have the choice of booting natively into windows or booting it as a vm inside osx. Seconding that, its what I do to get Spiceworks running. Works like a charm and pretty fast too.
|
|
#
?
Jan 7, 2012 10:40
|
|
|
bitprophet posted:My wife and I are trying to upgrade her original (2006, I think; first Intel model) Mac Pro's graphics card. All that seems readily available via OWC and Apple themselves is a couple related ATI cards and an obscenely expensive high end NVidia. (Or the Mac-spec'd NVidia 8800 GT which seems really hard to find these days.) You don't actually need to flash if you can live without the grey boot screen. Buy a reference model Radeon 6870 and it will work if you're running latest Lion.
|
|
#
?
Jan 7, 2012 11:49
|
|
|
flyboi posted:Anyone that's been watching apple store - have upgraded minis been popping up at all? I need one with the radeon gpu. quote:If you want to return an item, you can ship the item back to Apple, or bring it to any U.S. Apple Store for a full refund. For eligible Mac, iPad, iPod, and third-party products, you have up to 14 calendar days from the time you receive your item(s) to initiate a return. ...that said, I'm using my old 2009 mini with an HDHR Prime fine (other than Windows not liking my FW enclosure being on during startup), so it's not endemic to all of them  Bob Morales posted:To be fair, anything would have been cheaper than Xserves. kuskus posted:I'm sure that's true for many applications. If we wanted to get them on the existing fiber network connected to the Xsan (still lower latency for many items than GigE) we would need like, a Thunderbolt to PCIe box and a fiber card which may throw a wrench in a clean rack setup. Our Xserve nodes act like workstations and render complete scenes, so they're 8 core with 24GB of RAM. I guess we'd just need to re-think things a bit, but that's good suggestion. Oh Apple, people still have Pro needs.  (I assume the limited RAM would be an issue though). There's this wacky TB rack too but it's not out yet. Whenever the Ivy Bridge models come out that could be another nice bump since the biggest gains appear to be with the mobile CPUs.
|
|
#
?
Jan 7, 2012 12:03
|
|
|
Reposting this from the OS X thread, since it might be more of a hardware issue: A couple of days ago when starting up my MacBook Pro (late-2008, 15"), the shift key was suddenly stuck. Therefore it constantly boots in safe mode and I can't log in because I use lower case letters in my password. I can override it by plugging in a USB keyboard, but as soon as I touch the MacBook's keyboard, the shift key is stuck again. When I look at the Keyboard Viewer (I'm not sure that's what it's called in English, but I mean the graphic display of your keyboard that shows which buttons are being pressed) I can see that it's the left shift key that's the problem. When I write on the USB keyboard it isn't pressed down, but when I jump back on the MacBook keyboard, it gets stuck. It's out of warranty but I googled the problem and noticed a couple of other people have had the same issue with the same model as mine. I'm gonna call Apple on Monday and check if they've heard of it, but has anyone here experienced the same thing?
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2012 12:49
|
|
|
I'm currently pondering a new RAID card because my current one (RocketRAID 2320) seems to keep dropping disks occasionally. Plus its OS X support is spotty lately. Does anyone have experience with a RAID card in System 10.7? It needs to have >4 disk support and at least RAID-5. SATA3 and RAID-6 would be nice of course. Oh, and the disks will be internal so bonus points for good old-fashioned SATA ports rather than SAS etc.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2012 14:26
|
|
|
japtor posted:How do the old Xserve CPUs compare to the current Mac mini ones? And you can fit two in a 1U rack!
|
|
#
?
Jan 9, 2012 06:08
|
|
|
Ugh, my goddamn 27" iMac now has two dark... smudges on the display. Removed the glass, they are actually in the panel, so now I gotta take the drat thing in. So unhappy. :\
|
|
#
?
Jan 9, 2012 10:35
|
|
|
Eight Is Legend posted:Reposting this from the OS X thread, since it might be more of a hardware issue: Not that it's going to necessarily help your problem : but I had a relatable situation. I also have the late 2008 15" , and i had restored Lion to a newly installed SSD. Everything worked great for a while, until one day it seemed that the spacebar was being held down all the time. Couldn't log in, couldn't do much of anything. Come to find out that it had preserved my connection to my Apple Bluetooth keyboard, which was in a pile on a counter with a book leaning on it. Two loving days it took me to figure that out.
|
|
#
?
Jan 9, 2012 19:11
|
|
|
I've been been playing SWTOR on my 2011 15 inch Macbook Pro, and I'm starting to get a bit concerned about heat. Has anyone picked up a cooling pad for a unibody MBP? I've been looking at the laptop megathread and there are a few suggestions there, but it seems like the fans are in a tricky location on the Macbook. This one got a recent plug, but I was hoping for something a bit more size appropriate. Any advice?
|
|
#
?
Jan 9, 2012 20:29
|
|
|
Do you play on your lap? What about putting it on a stand? V V V yes, I think it is 
beefnoodle fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Jan 9, 2012 |
|
#
?
Jan 9, 2012 20:38
|
|
|
I play on a desk; I think I'm just worried about making the graphics card work hard for 3 or 4 hours at a time. Is that unnecessary paranoia on my part, as long as the ventilation isn't obstructed and I don't live in a sweat lodge?
|
|
#
?
Jan 9, 2012 20:41
|
|
|
Colonel Pancreas posted:I play on a desk; I think I'm just worried about making the graphics card work hard for 3 or 4 hours at a time. Is that unnecessary paranoia on my part, as long as the ventilation isn't obstructed and I don't live in a sweat lodge? Having done significant amounts of gaming on my MBP, I think you are overreacting. Honestly, this whole "cooling stand" fad is a sad testament to the lovely quality/design of generic gaming laptops...
|
|
#
?
Jan 9, 2012 20:52
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 20, 2024 00:54 |
|
|
shodanjr_gr posted:Having done significant amounts of gaming on my MBP, I think you are overreacting. Yeah, MBPs run hot and that's just how it is. They won't damage themselves barring defective hardware. I do run smcFanControl, though, and set my fans at 4-6k rpm before doing things liable to run the temperature up for extended periods of time. But that's more to eliminate the rubberbanding I've noticed the fans tend to do and keep them and the temperature stable.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2012 03:19
|
|
