Need advice on Macbook pro purchase

[gareth_c]

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Doesn't make much difference really...depends on what is convenient and how patient you are!

 

Lastly, you can of course pick up refurb models if price is a concern.

[gareth_c]

My experience is very different. On my MacPro I have 9gb RAM installed. With 5 gig I was routinely running into annoying memory problems.

 

I am really surprised by that. The machines we run in my studio have a max of 6gb ram and we never have problems. All of our laptops have 4gb or less and we are routinely creating A0 oversize documents rich in graphics and photos and the machines don't seem to ever choke.

 

We did have one similar problem but it turned out to be a hardward fault. Just a thought...

[wstotler]

Thanks for the information. I'll read the links and make a decision today or tomorrow. One other question, should I buy it through an Apple store or their website?

 

Me? I'd buy from the Web site and have it drop-shipped. It will come "ready to go" to your door and not require in-store Apple Store staff intervention to configure. Get AppleCare for sure--just buy it now and figure it into your machine purchase price. If you need it later you will most certainly be glad you have it. (I always get it on portables.) Additionally, I saw somewhere above that someone wrote "third-party memory" is cheaper. This is true. However, Apple has a thing for not wanting to warranty third-party memory (even when "certified" for use in Apples by the third party) or deal with computers that have third-party memory installed. (Example: Your motherboard develops a problem. They'll suspect the third-party memory was the cause. First. Before anything else. It will make dealings harder.) So, read the fine print in your warranty agreement or just get the Apple RAM, pay the premium, and don't worry about it. (It should come pre-installed if you order from the Web store.) In terms of one more thing? I've used a 15" for years--I find the 17" makes the computer less portable. Sure, it's just 2 inches, but they add up. The larger external monitor is the way to go. Just make the external monitor your primary when you're plugged in (and swap the Apple menu to it by moving the white bar in the Arrangement tab of the Displays window from one screen to the other). I'd go matte, for sure as the glossy screens are glare catchers. Whew. Good luck!

[Samir Jahjah]

I'm getting ready to pull the trigger on a Macbook pro but I wanted to hear what you guys would advise on a few things.

 

1. 17" High res matt screen or the 15" matt and a 23" cinema?

 

2. 160GB high speed 7200 hard drive or the slower but larger 250GB 4200 hard drive?

 

3. 2GB ram or 4GB ($750 dollar extra!!)

 

4. iwork 08

 

5. LR and CS3...any other software? I'm a ex PC user

 

Thanks in advance

 

1. The new 15'' LED screen is fabulous and is less power hungry. It is smaller and more easy to carry on the field

 

2. I would go for speed, and in any case you should have external hard drive for mass storage;

 

3. I just got 4GB from Crucial, it is easy to upgrade and cost $270. I don t understand why apple charges so much for the memory upgrade. And 4GB make a huge difference when using aperture/CS3

 

5. Aperture ... I prefer aperture's raw conversion and data management. It is so intuitive!

[mwalker649]

1. The new 15'' LED screen is fabulous and is less power hungry. It is smaller and more easy to carry on the field

 

2. I would go for speed, and in any case you should have external hard drive for mass storage;

 

3. I just got 4GB from Crucial, it is easy to upgrade and cost $270. I don t understand why apple charges so much for the memory upgrade. And 4GB make a huge difference when using aperture/CS3

 

5. Aperture ... I prefer aperture's raw conversion and data management. It is so intuitive!

 

 

I've heard from several people that the15" LCD is better or has a wider color gamut than the 17". On the apple website they don't have a "High Resolution" option for the 15" only the 17". The "high res" 17" is better than the standard 15" right?

[StS]

2. 160GB high speed 7200 hard drive or the slower but larger 250GB 4200 hard drive?

 

The 160GB 5400 hard disk is the drag of my otherwise fast MBP. I would recommend to go for the faster one and add an external drive occasionally for backup and final storage.

[S. Wong]

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I've heard from several people that the15" LCD is better or has a wider color gamut than the 17". On the apple website they don't have a "High Resolution" option for the 15" only the 17". The "high res" 17" is better than the standard 15" right?

 

Width Height res_w res_h area res_tot res/sq_inch

15 8.4375 1440 900 126.5625 1296000 10240

17 9.5625 1680 1050 162.5625 1764000 10851.21107

17 9.5625 1920 1080 162.5625 2073600 12755.70934

 

The 17"s always give you higher real resolution than the 15"

I would have a hard time, until I looked at the price, and thought "I can get a tower with better specs and lower cost!" but that only applies where you don't need/want a laptop

 

Personally, I've always gone by the policy "laptops are for laps" ie: light, mobile, battery life above all.

If this is what you want, the 15" is the way to go, as the 17" will suck battery life much faster.

 

if you are looking for a sometimes mobile desktop replacement, by all means, get the 17" or the 15 + a gigantic widescreen (or 3). Or if you have money to throw away, get the 17" & apple's marvel 30" cinema 2560x1600 (currently on sale for a mere $1800!)

 

back to reality:

to do serious photo-editing, the new macs should be all running a variant of OS-X x64, running x64 intel processors, but will not support more than 4gb of ram (according to crucial.com).

I don't know of anyone offering laptop DDR-2 sticks larger than 2GB, which is what you would need to get the mac up beyond 4GB. It only has 2 ram slots to my knowledge

-Steven

[gareth_c]

Or if you have money to throw away, get the 17" & apple's marvel 30" cinema 2560x1600 (currently on sale for a mere $1800!)

 

But worth it. I LOVE my 30" screen. Like I keep saying, get the Dell. Same components, cheaper and can be rotated etc unlike the Apple.

[wparsonsgisnet]

...to do serious photo-editing, the new macs should be all running a variant of OS-X x64, running x64 intel processors, but will not support more than 4gb of ram (according to crucial.com)...

 

Steven, you say should. I don't see this as an option for an MBP on the Apple site. Are you speaking about desktop machines?

[mwalker649]

I don't know of anyone offering laptop DDR-2 sticks larger than 2GB, which is what you would need to get the mac up beyond 4GB. It only has 2 ram slots to my knowledge

-Steven

 

Steven, I believe your right 4GB packages are all thats offered at crucial

[ericperlberg]

I read the O'Riely blog but I'm a little confused because the 17" now comes in the standard and the High res. Is he comparing the standard 17" screen or the High res screen? Also on the artical on how to add memory it says that a 3GB limit for the powerbook pro. Is that a old artical?

 

Looking at the Apple site it lists the standard built in monitor which has a native resolution of 1680px by 1050px and a high res optional monitor (ie built in screen) 1920x1200 resolution. Neither of these is the same as the LED based monitor on the 15" model. The built in screen with the larger pixel count will give you smaller text but fit more of an image or a spreadsheet etc on the screen. Trade-off is between text readability and what fits on a screen. If your eyes are good, go for the optional one, you'll see more of your images on the screen. If you do a lot of text reading and your eyes aren't that great (anymore, sigh) , get the standard one.

 

So on the O'Reilly blog he's really comparing the 15" computer which uses the new LED based screens that have a better display to EITHER the standard or high res on the 17" since the number of pixels packed on to the display is irrelevant to the issue of colour gamut. Hope I explained that clearly?

 

Yes, the newest MacBookPro now accepts and can address 4gig of RAM. It's not something that Apple controls in this case but an Intel issue. The "older" MacBookPros (the one I have) and in fact all machines using that earlier intel processor whether from Apple or Dell or HP etc had slots for 4 gig RAM but could only actually use 3 gig of RAM. I believe that what's happened is that the newer MacBookPros use a new version of the Intel Processor called the Santa Rosa which can actually use the 4 gig of ram. Voila.

 

Note: Apple was at least honest on the old machines and advertised that the max ram was 3 gig though you could physically put 4 gig in the machine. Some other PC laptop makers advertised that they could take 4 gig or ram, which was true but they didn't tell you that 1 gig was wasted with these last generation intel processors

[ericperlberg]

I am really surprised by that. The machines we run in my studio have a max of 6gb ram and we never have problems. All of our laptops have 4gb or less and we are routinely creating A0 oversize documents rich in graphics and photos and the machines don't seem to ever choke.

 

We did have one similar problem but it turned out to be a hardward fault. Just a thought...

 

Don't know Gareth, you could be right but I'm no stranger to managing large Mac networks in production environments. So for what its worth:

 

In my case, what happened was I started having all sorts of probs with how my macpro (with 5gig of ram) was handling apps. They wouldn't launch but if I quit some programmes they would launch. Sometimes they launched but in the background rather than the foremost window. I did some research. I read a lot of stuff on Apple's knowledge base. I wound up having a discussion with some guy on the Apple support forums who had a similar problem. He said Apple told him to add ram. I bought 4 gig more of ram going from 5gig to 9gig and haven't had the problem since (maybe 2 months now) where as before the problem happened constantly. How else would you interpret that? Of course it could have been yet a 3rd issue which coincidently got solved but I don't think so.

 

An A0 300dpi document (it doesn't matter whether there are graphic images on it or just white paper) is about 800meg in size. If you're printing out on an inkjet, you may be printing at 360dpi more likely you're printing at 240 or even 180 dpi. So the file sizes would be comparably even smaller than 800meg. I have 1dsMKII images that sometimes go to 1 gig in size.

 

Issues that effect how much ram photoshop needs include:

1) the size of the image

2) the number of history states you tell photoshop to maintain

3) the types of photoshop operations you are doing... certain Photoshop operations taken together (eg, gaussian blurs, unsharp mask, others) can multiply a file size and backup size by 40x according to Adobe's own documentation

4) the number of layers in the image

 

Photoshop nominally wants 70% of all available ram. On a 3 gig machine that means photoshop wants 2.1 gig (though if you work with Tiff files photoshop CS3 can work with 4 gig of ram). The system itself wants 1 gig. That doesn't leave much left on a 3 gig machine.

 

If Photoshop doesn't get that 70% it starts paging the image to the scratch disk with a significant slowdown in its operation. Personally if I'm spending £2k on a laptop, I'd spend the extra ££ to keep Photoshop happy and give it as much ram as possible.

 

At any rate I've repeatedly heard Adobe engineers themselves say that the more ram the better as per the article I referenced earlier (which was partly written by Photoshop engineers at Adobe).

[ericperlberg]

snip

 

back to reality:

to do serious photo-editing, the new macs should be all running a variant of OS-X x64, running x64 intel processors,

-Steven

 

Steven, I thought this might be slightly misleading to some Mac purchasers, there is only 1 variant of current OS X... Tiger. There isn't a specific x64 variant. Earlier versions of OS X (eg Panther which was 32 bit) will not run on a MacBook Pro or any of the Intel macs.

 

Tiger isn't even fully 64 bit, its kernal isn't 64 bit. But that doesn't effect anything on a practical level. In fact, Adobe has stated that there will be no advantage to having Photoshop be a 64 bit app in the near future and didn't intend to revise it for Leopard which will be the first true fully 64 bit version of the OS-X operating system.

[mwalker649]

 

So on the O'Reilly blog he's really comparing the 15" computer which uses the new LED based screens that have a better display to EITHER the standard or high res on the 17" since the number of pixels packed on to the display is irrelevant to the issue of colour gamut. Hope I explained that clearly?

 

Yeah...thank you. I think the 15" is the way to go..

[mwalker649]

OK done

 

Specifications

• 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
  
• 2GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM - 2x1GB
  
• 160GB Serial ATA Drive @ 7200 rpm
  
• SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
  
• MacBook Pro 15-inch Glossy Widescreen Display
  
• Backlit Keyboard/Mac OS - U.S. English
  
• iWork '08 preinstalled
  
• Accessory Kit
  
• AppleCare Protection Plan for MacBook Pro/PowerBook (w/or w/o Display) - Auto-enroll

Ordered 4GB memory from Crucial $300

Looking into 24" Dell monitor.

 

I went with glossy screen because I've been using one with my PC and I like it.

Bought it through my business and got 5% off. (approx 3K)

 

Thanks for your comments and help

[gareth_c]

OK done

 

Specifications

• 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
  
• 2GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM - 2x1GB
  
• 160GB Serial ATA Drive @ 7200 rpm
  
• SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
  
• MacBook Pro 15-inch Glossy Widescreen Display
  
• Backlit Keyboard/Mac OS - U.S. English
  
• iWork '08 preinstalled
  
• Accessory Kit
  
• AppleCare Protection Plan for MacBook Pro/PowerBook (w/or w/o Display) - Auto-enroll

Ordered 4GB memory from Crucial $300

Looking into 24" Dell monitor.

 

I went with glossy screen because I've been using one with my PC and I like it.

Bought it through my business and got 5% off. (approx 3K)

 

Thanks for your comments and help

 

Excellent, let us know how you get on with it.

[mitchell]

Hi,

 

I'm going to need a Mac Book Pro by mid September.

 

(I'm taking another course with David Hiser in Moab, Utah. He is a long time National Geographic photographer, a great guy, and great teacher.)

 

Is there any chance Apple will come out with the next round of new notebooks before then?

 

Thanks,

 

Mitchell

[norbertnl]

I'm considering a 15'' MBP as well, to purchase somewhere in fall or winter. Can anyone tell me how important enrollment in the AppleCare Protection Plan is? Is it 'nice to have' or is it an essential feature?

 

Thanks for any advice,

Norbert

[Guest Bernd Banken]

Hi,

 

I'm going to need a Mac Book Pro by mid September.

 

(I'm taking another course with David Hiser in Moab, Utah. He is a long time National Geographic photographer, a great guy, and great teacher.)

 

Is there any chance Apple will come out with the next round of new notebooks before then?

 

Thanks,

 

Mitchell

 

Hi,

 

if possible please wait until the launch of the new OSX 10.5, it's worth to wait.

 

Regards

Bernd

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[andybarton]

I'm considering a 15'' MBP as well, to purchase somewhere in fall or winter. Can anyone tell me how important enrollment in the AppleCare Protection Plan is? Is it 'nice to have' or is it an essential feature?

 

Thanks for any advice,

Norbert

 

I have always bought AppleScare for my PowerBooks. They get dropped, and knocked and are much more likely to go wrong than a desktop. (This goes for any laptop, of course, not just Powerbooks)