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Re: [Somewhat OT]: Considering a Mac....
| quote: | Originally posted by cryophonik
No, RANN and Eric J, I'm not going to switch.  I'm happy with my self-built PC and W7. However, our 5-6 yo HP (AMD64/2GB/W7 32-bit) laptop is getting on in years and it's pretty much become my wife and son's computer. They use it primarily for surfing the web, emails, and my wife occasionally uses it for work with MS Word and Excel, and she has some geneology and photo editing software that she runs - nothing that requires a powerhouse processor or more than 2GB of RAM. The biggest problem with it is that our son likes going to these educational websites, which bombard it with adware/spyware and the computer starts crawling like a turtle every few months and I have to go in and either clean it up or reinstall everything. So, we love our iPads so much that I'm considering replacing it with a secondhand MacBook, which I see selling for $500-600 pretty regularly in my neck of the woods.
My questions then (finally!) are, which model/OS should I be looking for (or avoiding)? Aside from the iPads and iPods, we're Mac virgins and, as mentioned above, we don't need a very powerful laptop, just a low-maintenance one. It would need to run MS Word/Excel, so I assume that means Bootcamp? And, we use Adobe PhotoShop CS2 and Lightroom. I will also probably load it up with PT9 and possibly Sonar (if possible with Bootcamp) or maybe even consider Logic Express for very light production work (e.g., scratch tracks, some tracking) when travelling. The only other consideration that I can think of is that it has to network with my W7 PC to access our photos (I have a 1TB HD dedicated to our photos) and another dedicated backup drive - is that going to be an issue? |
Damn, I saw the title and thought, he's seen the light finally
Macbook air is not a greta idea IMO. it has the lowest ratio of performance to value of any Mac. You're really paying for it's (lack of) weight, battery life, sleek design and portability (which in fairness is outstanding if that's your criteria).
I would try to get as new a macbook or MBP as you can. nothing older than 2008 though, as there were major changes (i.e. intel - and some software is now discontinuing support/updates etc for non intel macs).
Go snow leopard (which even if it doesn't have it is a painless install) not Lion (not so great for audio right now).
And no, you don't need to run bootcamp for office etc - all available on mac 
I reckon, try to get a 2009, 2010 second hand macbook - should be in your price bracket and still powerful enough for basic producing on it. Will alst you a good few years. I have a friend with a 4 year old macbook and it's still going strong and we've even done minor production work on it.
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