[dorknexus]

You asked for advice.
You got advice.
You didn't like the advice.

Are my critiques incorrect? No. Cost is not a primary concern for you. You're more concerned with purchasing an apple product than getting a good value.

So thus your choices are MacBook Pro or IMac. In other words Desktop or Laptop.

Laptop: Mobility at the cost of power
Desktop: Power at the cost of mobility.

In this case there isn't a huge difference in power.

You can hook up your monitors at home and just buy a separate keyboard to treat it like a desktop. Or, you can unplug it and sit in class with it to take notes or hammer out homework.

It's not like the MacBook Pro's are anemic or anything. They rock quad cores. Performance wise, there is little difference. If you really needed a power house of a computer you'd be on the market for a Mac Pro or you'd be building your own machine.

Seeing as they are close in performance and you have concerns for mobility, go with the more mobile solution.

Seems easy to me. The pro's and cons are obvious (as you stated) and thus why I think this thread is pointless.

This post has been edited by Dark_Nexus: 16 November 2010 - 10:51 PM

[ninechances]

okay okay I understand. You want the last word - makes perfect sense now.

[dorknexus]

but by posting that i don't get the last word (read "irony"). way to fuck up my plan.

This post has been edited by Dark_Nexus: 16 November 2010 - 11:23 PM

[moopet]

As far as I have observed, there is less power difference between mac desktops and laptops compared to the difference between pc desktops and laptops. If you're wondering why I'm saying this and think it's off topic, I'm agreeing with Nexus:

Quote

You can hook up your monitors at home and just buy a separate keyboard to treat it like a desktop. Or, you can unplug it and sit in class with it to take notes or hammer out homework.

I think it's actually because the Mac desktops are a bit crippled and don't cool as well as they'd have you believe. The laptops are pretty nippy.

Getting a second monitor to match the desktop is basically impossible.
Upgrading the desktop by adding peripherals is basically impossible. RAM, non-matching external monitor or external hard drive are your only real options. So there's not much benefit to it.

I'd go with the laptop. They're quite nice.

Full disclosure: I sold my last Mac laptop after realising that in my collection of computers, it was the one I could never be bothered to use.

[lordofduct]

First I'll agree, I wouldn't personally suggest mac, but hey, that's what you want.

In that case I'd agree with Dark_Nexus, the power of the machine between an iMac and MacBook are pretty small. So the only issue is portability. Get the portable one then!

This leaves one last issue I saw brought up. The harddrive. If you're going to go portable, I'd get the 128 gig SSD. That's a nice big SSD, and they're more quiet, run at lower temperatures, and can survive the beating of a portable device for a longer time. If you need storage, get an external harddrive that you hook up to at home.


That's how I roll in my house... my computer itself have smaller harddrives, maybe 200gigs at max (depending the OS and user of that machine for software). Then I have one central file server w/ 2 TB of storage. All those 'files' can go there.