Apple laptop versus windows laptop

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1

Hi, Im entering Newcastle (hopefully) next year to do a 3 year course at the uni on computer science and was going to purchase a laptop over the summer. My choices were to buy a very cheap laptop and get a more expensive desktop that could be used for gaming and graphics and so on or just getting a better laptop. A desktop would be greater value for money, but it is likely that I would be working on the go quite a lot. I dont do much programming right now and so have no idea which opperating system (if it really matters) would be best, I have experience with Linux, Windows, Mac OSX and was thinking of dual/tripple booting regardless off what kind of pc I get.

When choosing a laptop I would like something quite small with a large battery life which could play a game such as WoW decently so Im guessing now about £600. Looking at the black macbook, I should be able to get it with a student discount but could anyone reccomend any other decent laptop. Having looked around at pc’s before I tend to try and find a place which allows me to custom build to my own specifications and try not to go for something like dell which seem to charge at least 1.5x what they are selling. Thats not to say that a mac is expensive too, but I think they do give more for the money that you pay than dell do.

If I was to buy a pc then I would probably buy top-spec from somewhere like pcspecialist.co.uk where I can custom build it to my own specifications and it seems a lot cheaper than the top company counterparts such as dell and Hp which seem to add an extra £300 for the brand name.

So could anyone give me any advice which isn’t biased towards an opperating system. (each has its own quirks and problems)

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I’ve been dealing with this same quarrel myself, and the things to consider are:

If living on campus (or off too), what (if any) are the chances of your laptop being stolen. People are more likely to maliciously take a laptop and get away with it than a 10-20+ pound desktop.

If you plan on doing gaming, then you will probably want windows in some capacity (depending on the specific games obviously), but a large number of laptops have built in graphics cards not made for gaming or 3d work (though I know a large number of people here use blender on assorted laptops fine).

Also, there is the durability concern. Laptops are a whole lot more sensitive to falls and cracks (I would be interested, personally, if anybody can provide a comparison of apple vs. dell/hp/etc. laptop durability). This is a big concern if you plan on using the computer for 3+ years, because a desktop will weather the years considerably better than a laptop if its worth the money you pay for it (and if it doesn’t its significantly cheaper to replace a processor or graphics card or memory stick or motherboard than to replace a $2000 laptop).

As for operating system, I would assume your university will have computer labs where you could have access to windows or other os’s if you really need them. You may also want to see if you can find some old syllabi from courses you might be taking and see what languages they use and how professors expect work to be turned in. However, you said you wanted to dual/triple boot, so this probably would not be a problem.

All said, if I could have the whole two computer situation I would suggest going with a cheap Macbook and then a much better dual boot Windows/linux desktop. Otherwise I’d probably go with a desktop running Windows and linux (sorry to mac enthusiasts, but most colleges still run on windows and have yet to give major support for mac or linux, although they are growing).

You may also find out if your college has any statistics on computer use. My university recently said 89% of students have windows systems, and 42% of those are laptops. That gives you some idea of how professors are going to be catering to students (at least in the past), but will require all incoming freshman in a couple of years to have laptops (tells what professors will be expecting students to be capable of in the future).

All in all its going to come down to a balance between what you will need for school and what you will want to do in off time.

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At my university they use so many flavors of unix in their computer science classes that mac os fits right in just fine. it is windows that sticks out actually. we use windows computers running a virtual terminal to the sun supersparc solaris servers. we can access them remotely from home. X11 runs natively on mac, so connecting is super easy. yes, if you were taking engineering win would be better, but for CS mac is great.

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I wouldn’t get the black one anyway, it’s over-priced for what you get vs the white one, though some have said it doesn’t get as dirty. Supposedly, WoW plays pretty smoothly on the GMA chip but even so, that chip is about the lowest end these days. Even Dell allow you to get a Radeon x1400 upgrade. I don’t think Dell machines are very light or durable but their BTO options seem ok to me.

If you want a machine for 3 years I would have a look at the Apple refurb store. At one point, they had Macbook Pros with X1600 GPUs for £899. Right now the cheapest is £1149:

http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/ukstore.woa/wa/RSLID?nplm=FA609

They have the same warranty and if you can also get an educational discount you might get it for around £900. The X1600 card is about 10 times faster than the GMA chip and would certainly last you longer than the GMA, especially if you want to use Blender. The Macbooks all have glossy screens too which you either love or hate. I thought they were great until I used one and it’s actually quite reflective in certain circumstances. Then again, PC manufacturers seem to be going this way too.

I don’t think there’s much difference weight-wise between the MB and MBP either despite the MBP being bigger.

The only PC laptops I’ve ever liked were Sony Vaios but they cost as much if not more than Macs so I wouldn’t know where to start on the PC side.

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osxrules; would you say that the macbook pro is too much money then? I have a DSA allowance (dyslexia) and the educational discount. I have had a 12" G4 powerbook in the past and was wondering how the macbooks compare to that now.

SamAdam; you appear to go to a uni in the USA and I believe that macs have more (a lot more) usage there than in the UK. Its also a bit annoying how it would be $400 cheaper in the US if I were to buy from the US shop but anyway.

What proramming language do you use, what tools do you use and so on. Have you tried / wanted to install windows on a mac?

forTe; thanx for the sound advice, about the stealing of desktops. Would you ever lock your pc up when you go out. What would you do if you were comming back home in the holidays, would you cart it back home?

thanx for your time.

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luckily got a macbook pro for christmas
runs no xp type exes unless you run something like apple bootcamp
or a $100 dollar program and have a valid xp version more money

havent installed that
the computer costs about 2000 us dollars
a little high i thought
portability is great
blender runs fine 2.44
i think i can add 3 more gigs of ram;only 1 ram
finds networks easily with apple airport
read somewhere you can use it to access your xp remotely and shift files

nothing like going outside to work on your computer ;has helped solve a lot of troubleshooting problems in checking network functioning and ranges

if it crashes or you shut off power gives you the option to reload what you had

has xcode which i think can write objective c ,java and other goto apple site check the languages

no problems yet ,no adware or spyware
also no ie unless you also run dual operating systems

you can go almost anywhere

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after installing xcode I use gcc to work in C and C++ just fine. the truth is that all computers can do the same things. If pick one that you like and fits your budget, and rest assured that other people have already figured out what you need to do for you. i use both bootcamp and parallels to run ubuntu and winxp. both run well.

Sam

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I’ve heard stories (not specifically from my college, although I’m sure it happens) of people who are working on laptops one minute, get up to go to the bathroom or get a drink and come back to find their computer stolen. That’s why its very important (especially here in the states, not sure about theft rates abroad, but I’m sure it happens) to have computer locks if you have a laptop or even a desktop. If you are not in your room, it probably needs to be tied down because its not only your roomate who can let people in your room, but maintenance staff, some RA’s probably have keys, etc. and who knows when they will be doing something and leave and forget to lock the door and you come back to find that 20 page paper along with your entire computer gone without a trace.

Yeah, so its a pain on holidays and the like to take a desktop home (holiday being an extended break like winter or summer), but I’d say its worth it to lug a desktop to a car a couple times a year, rather than buy a new one a couple times a year.

Of course, they do make laptop locks, its just a matter of remembering to use them. Don’t forget that as nice as some people seem, its very easy for that to just be a facade.

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For your computer I would just get a mac, cause then you could triple boot all three main operating systems Mac OSX (or Leopard depending on when you get the laptop), Windows and Linux. The only problem is that it is hard to upgrade macs.

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Well, I hate to say it (because buying new stuff is fun :slight_smile: ) but if you don’t really know the “lay of the land” where you’re expecting to be going, maybe you should wait until you get there to invest a significant amount of money. Questions like “how safe will this/that location be”, “what do other people have”, “what will I need for classes” etc. will be easier to answer once you’ve been there for a little while.

Now, that said, if I just had to get myself a new something in this situation, I’d probably go with a cheap laptop, maybe even an older refurbished one, and put linux on it. If it turns out you need something else, you haven’t invested too much money, and it never hurts to have a cheap spare laptop to drag around, beat up, etc.

On the other hand, I’m starting to grow fond of the new 15" MacBook Pro… but I’m resisting the temptation because I think I want an 8-core MacPro instead… ! :slight_smile:

Sarah

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The Macbook Pro new certainly used to be too much money as benchmarks showed that for CPU tasks they were identical to the Macbook so you were basically paying £600 for a graphics card, bigger screen, firewire 800 and an expresscard slot (the latter two you probably wouldn’t use). They were updated recently to the Santa Rosa chipsets though with faster front side buses and the new NVidia 8600M GT graphics cards (which are 3 times faster than the X1600) as well as new CPUs and bigger hard drives so now the Macbook Pro seems more worth it. But still the refurb makes sense as you get close to the same performance for not much more than the black macbook. The black one is £949 and that refurb is just £200 more.

If you compare the black and white models, the white with 120GB HD is £829 and the black with 160GB is £849 so you’re paying £120 for black + 40GB space, which I don’t think is worth it.

In summary, if you want to save money and have a small laptop with a powerful CPU but average graphics performance then go with the middle Macbook (white looks better IMO).

If you want to spend a bit more to have the extra graphics performance, go with a refurb Macbook Pro.

The Macbooks are about 4 times faster. For once Apple’s marketing is actually accurate. That’s how bad the G4s were. The CPUs in the Macbooks can keep up with G5s, sometimes even exceed them because the Intel compilers are better.

Apple did reduce the price here a little recently to make up for the difference but we still pay more. As for UK universities, I went to university in the UK and they only had Windows (2000) for the Freshers. The grown ups used Macs and Linux. :slight_smile:

All the students used Windows laptops but almost none of the professors did.

It was mainly Redhat Linux on the classroom computers actually but the department started switching to Macs when I was leaving (damn them). Universities are big on unix because it’s a good development platform. That’s CS again. If it was accounting, it would be mainly Windows.

You can use pretty much any language you want. My CS course taught Java and C mainly. On the Mac, you can use the terminal or XCode. XCode was pretty clunky when I was using it but it has improved. Leopard should see the biggest improvement and it has all sorts of neat debugging tools. You can also do system-wide application scripting with Python and Ruby.

I have also installed Windows. First it was via Parallels but I only wanted Windows for some games, which it didn’t support. I then used Bootcamp (which is just like running Windows on a PC). I used it for the games I’d missed over the years. But now I barely use it at all.

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now that Mac has Parallels and other virtualization software you can run lots of windows applications under OSX!!!

Dunno, I think you will get a better deal on hardware, and more software titles/games if you stick with a windows based system.

If you want a flashy desktop, with limmited software titles, you can still do it on a PC, just install Linux and Beryl!
you can virtualize windows from linux too when you get board :slight_smile:

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osxrules; which uni are you in, edinburgh or aberdeen (your location says scotland), off the topic a bit, could you recomend any books to buy for the course or would you reccomend asking for a book list prior to the course. I have applied to newcastle for firm BCC, and Aberdeen for insurance CCC. How do you like your course, what were the easy bits/hard bits. Did you do programming before entering your course.

When we talk about refurbished laptops what does this mean, does it mean that someone has owned it, dropped it, sent it back, its been fixed and now on sale or what?

Your right, I know that one of the professors has a mac.

BlenderMF; is it possible to tripple boot on a mac, I understand that it is possible to put linux and windows on but I thought that (if this makes sense) windows used boot camp and linux used a grub loader (to select opperating systems at startup) but Im probably wrong

SamAdam; Im guessing that you are in a CS job, or student or just a hobby. I understand that you can program in any opperating system but do you have any preference. If you were to make a gui in apple’s gui designer would that only work on a mac. Could you reccomend any material to read up on to give a understanding of computer science.

As the A levels that I am taking are Maths, Chemistry and Physics and so as such I have no programming ability (except a sliver of html but this doesnt count)

Edwin; Few years ago I wanted to upgrade my 12"powerbook but this would void the laptop. If you upgrade a macbook pro to 2gb’s of ram then this costs I think 200 pounds, but if you look on the crucial website (or something similar) it gives ram for only 60 pounds per Gb. Would you reccomend upgrading the ram and voiding the warrenty ( I would only do this after 6 months or so just in case anything does go wrong) or spending more money just for the extra gig of memory.

Thanx for your time.

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I finished years ago but I went to St Andrews.

They will give you a recommended list when you start. It differs for each course. I can’t think off-hand of any books that particularly blew me away. Kernighan and Ritchies C programming guide is quite handy but it has limited scope.

I didn’t do CS when I started and I only considered it going into second year and they weren’t going to let me in but they eventually did. I did a joint degree in Physics and CS after switching from Maths and Physics. I should have stuck with Maths though, theoretical physics is so boring. The good thing about doing a joint degree is you can pick and choose the best modules.

It usually means a part was faulty and was repaired. I don’t know if they are preowned or just damaged from the factory line. What most people find is that they are more reliable than new models because a technician has tested it thoroughly before sending it to you whereas new models can arrive with defects.

They can be scratched I guess but I haven’t heard anyone say that who have bought refurbs. The refurbs tend to be fairly new machines. That Core 2 Duo refurb can’t be more than a year old. For a saving of £300, I personally wouldn’t mind a scratch here and there but if you don’t want to risk it, go for the macbook.

Yeah, that’s right. In CS it doesn’t matter so much because you don’t really do any meaningful projects. I used Apple’s GUI deisgner and my interface was much more advanced than anyone else’s and yet much easier to make. It literally took me about 3 days to design the whole thing and it had OpenGL stuff, sliders, text boxes, radio buttons, tabs. Everybody else had to hand code their interfaces and it took them ages and they still looked pretty bad.

There are cross-platform GUI toolkits but they rarely have a drag and drop designer. The only one I found that I would pick is Qt but at the time, it wasn’t open source for OS X but it is now:

http://trolltech.com/developer/downloads/qt/index

Usually they have CS courses in first year. I missed those out so that’s why they weren’t keen on me starting in second year. As long as you take them in first year, you should be fine. they’ll advise you on what you need.

Upgrading Ram doesn’t void your warranty. Upgrading the hard drive didn’t used to either but I think the Macbook Pro is different because they added something to make it quieter and you’re not supposed to mess with it. the Macbook hard drive is not the same. Both Ram and hard drive are easily accessible via the battery compartment and do not void the warranty.

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Since I have in my office “a laptop of every system-type imaginable, all hard at work earning money,” let me kindly throw in my two cents.

  • First, buy “a good laptop.” After all, it’ll do you no good at all if it’s “in the shop” on exam-day. - Then, choose the [operating-] system type, according to your needs. - Plan your decision to be suitable over no more than the next two years (recognizing full-well that “old Dobbin” will probably be in your corral for the next ten years or more). {Hey, you paid $1,000 for it and today you couldn’t get $80 for it on eBay so ya may as well keep it…} - (For heaven’s sake… with all the cast-off slightly-used but perfectly-great equipment that’s out there every nanosecond on e*Bay, you really can afford a dozen! Are you trying to buy a fashion statement, or are you in the market for “a tool for the job?” I know… I know… it sucks, but the ‘tool’ will do just as well. Trust me. Maybe next time… it’s okay… really… :wink: )
    Okay… what’s “a good laptop?” Well, it’s built like a battleship, it comes from a vendor that you’ve actually heard of, and the batteries can still be purchased and they last for more than two hours. It runs an operating-system that you’ve actually heard of (even if such a version is not yet installed, and even if it’s not Vista). It doesn’t make weird clicking noises.

As to what type of computer it is, that should be determined most of all by your present business-need. If you are a college student, it should be the type of system that will inflict upon you the least amount of headaches. (And if it so happens that you can justify having more than one type of machine, each of them needs to be a system that you can afford to have two of. It’s fine: I have four, and I haven’t been a college-student in <<CENSORED:NONE_OF_YER_BUSINESS>> years.)

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without shadow of doubts a linux one, its even cheaper :).

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Actually your completely wrong, how many manufacturers do you know sell linux laptops, there are a few I know that sell linux desktops/workstations. Even then they might not be good specs and some may charge to get the iso in the first place (remember 700mb-1.5gb is quite a lot to download)

Although you might be able to do this for custom uilt laptops, those are too few and expensive out there anyway.

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i would upgrade to 2g for sure ;i have one and i notice it

my problem with the mac book is installing python scripts
they hide the folder from you
you have to access it from the console using a sequence of commands
which no one has listed in an understandable complete list that i have found
im still trying to install a dts exporter script for torque

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System 76

Dell

Linux Certified

Google

20

The folder for Blender’s own scripts is hidden. You can put your own scripts anywhere. Just make a folder somewhere and choose it as the python path in the system preferences.

You can also load and run scripts via the Blender text editor. Just open the file and hit alt-P.