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My current job is coming to an end, and when it does, I have to send back the laptop they gave me to use. I've wanted to get a MacBook for a while, mostly because that's the last modern OS that I really have no experience with. Also it's pretty. My problem is that I haven't really kept up with CPU and GPU tech in ages, so I don't have a clue what's what anymore, and while I can compare specs on different models, it's hard to tell what's actually important. What I need: * Web browsing * Some sort of Office suite (doesn't necessarily have to be Microsoft office, but I'd like to have a good word processor and spreadsheet software at minimum) * Built in webcam for video calling * Battery that will let me use the computer for several hours without having to worry about plugging in * Lots o' pixels (I don't care if everything looks tiny... resolution is important to me). What I don't care about : * Gaming (Macs have games now? I kid, I kid... but seriously, I don't care about gaming on a laptop) * Massive amounts of harddrive space (my work laptop has 230 GB and I'm not even using half of it). * Size/weight (Big or small, I can handle it just fine) What I care about even though I shouldn't: * The casing. Basically, the plastic white MacBooks drive me crazy, and I do not want one. I loved the black ones, but it seems like they stopped making those long ago. I honestly don't care too much for the brushed metal thing, either, but I'll take it over cheap looking plastic. For my needs, I honestly think a plain old MacBook would probably be fine. Cost is a concern. I am eligible for student discounts through my college, but the discounts aren't exactly amazing. This basically leaves me with the following options: $$$$ Buy a new MacBook Pro $$$ Buy a refurbished/previous generation MacBook or MacBook Pro $$ Buy previous generation hardware through Amazon or whatever $ Buy used That all brings me back to the specs, since I would potentially be comparing previous generation hardware to current hardware, and I still don't know how much better an i5 is over a Core 2 Duo, or whatever the options are. I know I don't need top of the line, but I'd still like it to be comfortably peppy. Are there any specs I should straight up avoid?
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Aug 2, 2011 19:50
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movax posted:Get anything that is Core i5/i7, ideally something from 2011 so you pick up the benefits of the 2nd Generation Core ix architecture, also known as Sandy Bridge. Improved performance and improved power efficiency; to give you an idea the new 13" MBA with a 1.6GHz 2nd Gen. Core i7 beats my 15" 2010 MBP with a 2.66GHz 1st Gen. Core i7. Comparing apples to apples, the new 15" gets about two more hours of battery life than mine as well. This is the sort of feedback I was looking for, thanks. I hadn't really considered the Air, because, well, I don't know. But it probably is an option worth pursuing. When looking at refurbs, I'll try to stick with the i5/i7 series. How important is it to max out RAM? Somebody mentioned earlier that 4GB should be considered a minimum for Lion. It looks like RAM is soldered into the Airs, so I wouldn't (easily?) be able to upgrade that at a later date vs a MBP.
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Aug 2, 2011 20:37
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El Duke posted:Just FYI, you won't see refurb i5/i7 Airs in the store for a few months, if you were considering trying to snag one of those. I start my new job on the 15th, and I don't really know what to expect from it in terms of company equipment. I can't see that they would have any reason to provide me with a company laptop, given what I'll be doing, but I'm planning on holding off any purchases AT LEAST until I find out that much. After that, if I am still in need, it's likely refurb shopping time, or comparing to current generation MBAs. Either way, ouch.
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Aug 2, 2011 21:18
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I completely blame all of you for this: My wife and I went to the Apple Store yesterday, after y'all had pretty well talked me into a 13" MacBook Air. I compared the Air to a couple of Pros, and decided I did like the Air better. I am a college student, so I asked about discounted pricing. The dude told me $100 off the Air (a lie, probably honest mistake, as I would later find out) plus a $100 App Store gift card. And discounted AppleCare. Next up, we went to Best Buy, since I'd have to apply for financing at the Apple Store, but I already have a Best Buy credit card. They had a slightly different promotion. They were selling the same model MBA for $1235 (or so?), and offering a $100 Best Buy gift card to match the Apple promotion. Plus the store I was at was doing 36 month financing with the Best Buy card. gently caress yeah! There was some more confusion on the $100 off thing, and it turns out that the education discount on the Air is only $50, and the Best Buy price actually comes in under that, so that was the better deal overall. So I got my Air, brought it home, started playing with it. Not even an hour after setting it up, my wife is looking up Mac Minis online. Long story short, we go back to the Apple store and she gets an entry level Mac Mini, wireless keyboard and trackpad.  We decided not to spend the extra $300 for more RAM since crucial.com says we can max the sucker out for like $60 or $70, so we'll probably do that. The new Minis make RAM upgrades crazy simple compared to the old ones, apparently. So, umm, I'm glad my job starts in a week.
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Aug 7, 2011 20:21
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Binary Badger posted:
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Aug 7, 2011 23:00
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CaptainCaveman posted:Instant gratification: waiting a month to buy something instead of buying it now and waiting a month for it. I thought it was buying something today, making your wife jealous, then buying another thing for her that same day.
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Aug 8, 2011 04:41
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This may be more of a software thing, I don't know, but some of the differences between the keyboard on my new MBA and the Windows keyboards I'm used to are starting to bug me. Things like the lack of Home and End keys (I've figured out that Command+Left and Command+Right seem to approximate this), but I haven't been able to figure out a way to do a Windows-style delete (delete the character to the right of the cursor, rather than backspace) yet. I never realized how often I used that.
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Aug 9, 2011 14:27
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ndrake posted:fn+delete Neurophonic posted:Cmd+Up and Cmd+Down do Home and End, left and right move to the beginning or end of the current line. Are there any super important keyboard shortcuts I need to know about?
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Aug 9, 2011 15:36
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For what it's worth, I took my brand new MBA outside yesterday for a few minutes, and on a very bright Texas summer day, the screen was perfectly visible.
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Aug 9, 2011 17:57
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japtor posted:This is a software question For a real hardware question, since the MBA does not have a user replaceable battery, is there anything I need to do or avoid doing in order to prolong the overall life of the battery? It seems to handle sleep very well (way better than any Windows portable I've ever used), but I'm not sure if I should be plugging it in more often, less often, or just whenever.
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Aug 9, 2011 21:00
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One of you was joking about hoping that my wife doesn't ask for a Thunderbolt Cinema Display, but just for kicks I looked online at them. Is that 27 inch beast the only size display they sell anymore!? It seems like they used to have at least a few different sizes, starting with a merely "very large" 20 inch and going up from there. Her 22" Samsung is working well enough with the HDMI to DVI adapter that came with her Mac Mini, but she was complaining a little bit about the text (loving typography class she took in college permanently switched something on in her brain). I played with the color calibration thing, and I guess that helped, I don't know. But anyway, the only display they sell is $1000?! Unrelated hardware question (and I checked the OP this time, I promise!): What's the general consensus on Time Capsule/Airport Extreme/Time Machine? Right now I'm just using the router that Verizon provided for our FIOS service, which is surprisingly robust, but it only does Wireless B/G. I'd love to get some Wireless N and gigabit LAN action going on in here, and having a nice automated backup source thing seems like a nice idea as well. From the very little I've seen, Time Machine looks to be about as straightforward as backup systems get, but would appreciate feedback from other goons (I realize this is more of a software question, but whatever). Finally, as for the wifi component, how much flexibility does it give you? Port forwarding? Static DHCP leases? VPN passthrough (straight up VPN support is probably asking too much)? $300 is not exactly an impulse buy, but for a boost in overall network speed (we've got several devices that support wireless N, but just aren't using it) and a centralized backup system that presumably integrates nicely with our computers, it's not an unreasonable cost.
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Aug 11, 2011 23:52
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Star War Sex Parrot posted:It's still better than most PC laptop trackpads, but just not as good as in OS X. It's not as smooth in my experience, and I don't think there's any way to enable natural-scrolling which can be a bit of a mindfuck if you've gotten used to it in Lion. Maybe there's an invert scrolling option in Windows that I'm just too lazy to look for. I started my new job today, where they provided me with a Dell Latitude notebook. After a week of using the Air, the trackpad on that thing was nearly unusable. 
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Aug 16, 2011 02:41
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Star War Sex Parrot posted:Here's the review that I took that image from. I read that review. Didn't it also come to the conclusion that there was no significant speed difference when backing up over wifi (both suck)? That's what I'd be looking at with my MBA and my wife's mini (mainly because the mini is a different room from the router, and it's too loving hot in the attic to run cable right now).
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Aug 19, 2011 02:22
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KingEup posted:Logitech are on a roll: That looks cool, but it looks like it's designed to be a Windows keyboard. Would the trackpad work as expected on a Mac? And that reminds me... is there a decent wireless keyboard that actually has a number pad? What the gently caress is up with the Apple wireless keyboard not having a number pad? For $70, that's pretty awful.
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Aug 22, 2011 00:16
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lelandjs posted:I'm actually thinking that I may just be better off getting a Windows desktop... I will mostly be using it for gaming, after all.
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Aug 30, 2011 05:51
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Star War Sex Parrot posted:Only the new MacBook Air and Mini can do an Internet restore of Lion with a completely blank drive. 
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Sep 3, 2011 04:22
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I've been treating my MBA like I do my cellphone, for the most part... use it as I need it, plug it in when it starts to get low, then generally plug it in before bed and let it charge overnight, unplugging it in the morning. Thanks for the reminder on the discharge, though... I've had it about a month, so I guess it's time to do that.
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Sep 4, 2011 23:32
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I'm trying to run down my MacBook Air battery and it's taking forever... I'm now in my last 5%, and it seems like the performance has dropped significantly. Does it scale back the CPU when the battery is super low or something? Or is it all in my head or just a coincidence?
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Sep 9, 2011 00:41
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Star War Sex Parrot posted:The Air is my primary machine for day-to-day stuff. I use my 27" iMac for photo and video editing, games, and watching stuff. They're really quite complimentary for my purposes. At home, the Air is my primary. It sits next to my recliner and is up and running in a matter of seconds. And with my recent discovery of OnLive, could end up also becoming my "PC gaming" machine as well. I still keep my Windows 7 desktop around, and it's useful for when I need more viewing space, such as working on my online classes, but for the most part, everything I do is on my Air. Work is a completely different story.
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Sep 24, 2011 15:50
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mediaphage posted:It's not good enough for OnLive because it doesn't have a hard wired Ethernet connection - which definitely makes a difference. If someone ever comes out with a Thunderbolt --> Ethernet connector that actually ships, it'll be great. OnLive bitches about being on wifi, but on my Wirelss N connection it works just fine. I haven't actually purchased anything, but every demo I've played has worked perfectly. But I definitely need to plug in an external mouse, because the trackpad just doesn't cut it for gaming.
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Sep 24, 2011 16:33
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Every once in a while, my MacBook Air charges seems to decide it doesn't want to charge anymore. The orange light just goes off. Not green, just off. If I unplug it from the side and plug it back in, it turns green briefly, then back to orange, and starts charging again. Is this something I should worry about?
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Oct 25, 2011 04:58
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japtor posted:Yeah take it in/call about it, could just be the charger or something bigger like whatever charging stuff in the MBA itself. It's not a problem that I can duplicate even though it's happened a few times now. Will the Apple Store people do anything if they can't duplicate it? I suppose I could try calling first and see what they tell me.
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Oct 25, 2011 22:47
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necrobobsledder posted:Wait a second, it's supposed to always be green if it's not charging? My MBP does that sometimes and I thought it had to do with the new intelligent battery wear system that came with the Unibody MBP so long ago? If the light went off after it was fully charged, I might not be concerned. But when I've observed this happening, it's happened before the MacBook had finished charging. Oddly enough, if I happen to be using it when the light goes out, the battery icon still shows the thunderbolt. But one morning after leaving it plugged in overnight, the light was off and the battery was almost dead, which makes me suspect it wasn't really charging at all.
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Oct 25, 2011 22:52
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Sure enough, I've got the same update available. I wonder what was broken in 2.1...
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Oct 27, 2011 03:20
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I never know which thread is the appropriate one for Apple Airport Extreme questions, so if it's not this one, feel free to yell at me and I'll run away crying. Recently our Airport has been acting up. It will completely drop everything from wifi (to the point where my MacBook Air can't even find the Airport in Airport Utility), but then everything will reconnect. Once I downgraded my Airport Utility to the more functional 5.6 version (which allows me to look at logs), I see that shortly after it comes back to life, the logs say "Initialized (firmware 7.5.2)." as the first thing in the logs, with a very recent timestamp. This leads me to believe the device is rebooting itself. A lot. I haven't observed the light doing anything other than staying green, though, which is weird. I had been at the current firmware level, 7.6.1, but tried downgrading in case that was part of the issue (I remembered updating the firmware not all that long ago, so I figured it was worth testing), but that doesn't seem to have made a difference. I'm confident that the issue isn't on the client side, since I've personally observed an iPad, MacBook Air and Windows 7 PC all dropping at the same time. The support site says that I'm still covered under "Repairs and Service", but when I try to "Set Up a Repair", the website just hangs indefinitely. I'm not even sure what's involved, since I've never had to get repair service before. I guess I'm just looking for a bit of guidance... should I keep trying the website? Is this something an Apple Store would handle? Am I going about this entirely the wrong way?
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Apr 3, 2012 03:25
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Star War Sex Parrot posted:I imagine so. If my AEBS were doing that and still under warranty, I'd probably just march in and ask for a replacement. Thanks. I'm still fairly new to the Apple world, and this is the first time I've ever had a potential repair issue. I'll take it in and see what they tell me. Already exported my configuration, so hopefully setting a new one back up will be a breeze.
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Apr 3, 2012 03:49
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brc64 posted:I never know which thread is the appropriate one for Apple Airport Extreme questions, so if it's not this one, feel free to yell at me and I'll run away crying. Sort of a weird question, but does the Airport Extreme have some sort of client connection limit? Since I turned off our newest PC, it seems to have stopped rebooting. A while back I had noticed something similar going on with our Linux box (wired, not wireless), which had shut down because it overheated. When I turned it back on, the Internet died. I thought I was crazy, but now I'm not so sure... since the computer was having hardware problems, I just shut it down and left it off, but the problems seemed to start happening once we hooked up this new PC... it just seems a bit too coincidental.
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Apr 4, 2012 04:28
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Star War Sex Parrot posted:AEBS supports dozens and dozens of clients. If anything, your new PC maybe be flooding bad packets or doing something else wonky that's causing the network to go down. I'd buy that if it was just the PC, but the Linux box (which previously worked fine) exhibited similar behavior. It's like if either of those are on the network, it causes instability. I guess I could geek out and get some wireshark going, but gently caress, I'm supposed to be off work when I get home! I suppose the next best thing would be to send the Airport logs to a syslog server, since I can't tell what the last thing it logs is before it reinitializes...
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Apr 4, 2012 05:27
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Star War Sex Parrot posted:Were they using the same patch panel/cable? Is there a problem with that run? The Linux machine was plugged directly into the AEBS. The new PC is a cheap media thing plugged into our living room TV and connecting over wireless. I just got syslogd working, so I'm gonna try some tests shortly...of course, it's entirely possible that whatever causes the thing to crash will also prevent it from sending that crucial bit of info to the syslog, but I'm not really sure what else to try at this point.
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Apr 4, 2012 06:01
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brc64 posted:The Linux machine was plugged directly into the AEBS. The new PC is a cheap media thing plugged into our living room TV and connecting over wireless. I just got syslogd working, so I'm gonna try some tests shortly...of course, it's entirely possible that whatever causes the thing to crash will also prevent it from sending that crucial bit of info to the syslog, but I'm not really sure what else to try at this point. I had thought that I fixed the problem by disabling IPv6 on my new Media PC, since the problem stopped occurring. But when I started actually using it this morning, almost right away, the connection started dropping again. So I did some more searching, and I found Lots of people having similar problems. But it was this post that really got the gears turnings in my head. One of the last things I did on the Linux server was install Plex Media Server to stream things to our Apple TV. And since the new PC is basically for the same purpose, that was one of the first things I installed there as well. The one commonality I see in most of these threads are people complaining about the problems happening when they try to stream things, and although I'm not specifically streaming anything when mine resets, maybe something about how Plex is implemented isn't playing nice with the AEBS. So I've uninstalled that, and so far so good... we'll see if things hold out.
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Apr 7, 2012 19:42
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