MacBook or Pro?

[Misfit]

We need a Mac in the office to test our sites on and I need a new laptop.

As they can now run XP too (and I will need that on my laptop) a Mac laptop seems like a good idea to kill two birds with one stone.

Other than screen size and a slightly faster processor is there any real reason to go for a Pro over a standard MacBook? There is quite a price differential.

Has their been any success with running Vistas on a Mac?

[Misfit]

And as checking the above the store goes down for an update.

Are we expecting new things soon?

[Bubba]

Vista works fine under boot camp.

Cheers

Bubba

[Mary Poppins]

I use both a macbook and a macbook pro at work. Out of the two, ignoring difference in specs, the macbook pro is a clear winner in terms of hardware reliability. The macbooks (both black and white) have issues with battery failure, case discolouration, flickering screens etc. I'm on the second one and already it won't recognise the battery.
The macbook pro 15" has been faultless. Yeah, they cost more, but in terms of total cost of ownership with downtime etc the macbook is a no no.

Just my view. ymmv.

[Dave]

I'm with Mary Poppins on this one. I have a Macbook Pro and it's never given me any hardware issues at all.

All of the plain Macbooks I've seen have had issues with the case, and the screens on them are complete SHIT compared to all other laptops out there. They're far too dim. Hell, every $500 laptop I've seen has a better LCD than them.

Normal MB's feel VERY cheap for the price. I don't understand, as the iBook's they replaced were quite lovely.

That being said, the Pro's aren't cheap either. VERY nice aesthetically. If you look in Apple's refurb store, you can buy a Pro for less money than a new one. Worth a look.

[Stone]

Normal MB's feel VERY cheap for the price. I don't understand, as the iBook's they replaced were quite lovely.

I agree with this (and I'm typing this on a black MacBook ). The iBooks and Powerbooks were lovely; the Macbook feels really cheap and plasticky by comparison, especially the white ones.

I would have gone for a 15" Pro when my PB died but they just don't make them small enough. Where oh where is the 12" variant?! Dropping that revision was the silliest thing they've done in ages - even 13.5" is on the chunky side so having 15" as the smallest model is madness. Some of us don't have arms like Tyson!

Stone

[pogo]

Other than screen size and a slightly faster processor is there any real reason to go for a Pro over a standard MacBook? There is quite a price differential.

The MacBook has the same Intel GMA 950 graphics as the Mac mini. This is slower for graphics intensive apps and uses main RAM instead of dedicated VRAM, so you have less RAM for apps - at least 80MB less, but more if you're doing anything graphics intensive, such as playing 3D games.

It also can be more expensive to upgrade RAM, as because the GMA uses main RAM it's important to install RAM in matched pairs, more so than other Macs. It ships with 1GB of RAM, 512MB of RAM in each DIMM slot, and you don't want to upgrade only one DIMM from 512MB to 1GB as you will lose the speed boost matched pairs of DIMMS give you, for not much benefit.

So to upgrade to 2GB you buy two 1GB DIMMs and throw away the 512MB ones - probably not throw away, but I've now got two going spare which I'll never find a use for.

I've got one - I don't use it for games, it didn't cost much to upgrade to 2GB of RAM. I like the design, as it's a nice form factor, has a very good screen, and apart from for games could serve as a desktop replacement at a pinch. I'd recommend the black one as the white plastics do age more quickly with use, and you still save a lot over a MacBook Pro.

[Misfit]

Thanks for all the advice.

Went to the refurb store and there was one of the latest MacBook Pros on for £1100 saving £199 on list price. On top of that I can claim VAT back making it £936 delivered.

I need a Vista test machine and an OS X test machine and my laptop is creaking a bit. So I persuaded my business partner it is a good investment and ordered it.

So weak!

Don't suppose it can have Vista, XP and OS X all installed at the same time?

Any way to do dual monitors, maybe through a docking station?

[Dave]

There is no dock on the Macbook Pro's, but they have a DVI out (and a DVI-to-VGA dongle which comes with it). It can support dual-screens, with the second screen being up to a 30" LCD (QSXGA - 2560x2048 max). One of the displays HAS to be your Macbook Pro display, however.

Bootcamp, Apple's dual-boot program, lets you have two OS's installed. Doing three is going to be tricky, and you'll have to Google for a hack for it.

Vista and XP SP2 are supported (if you don't have XP SP2, you'll need to slipstream the service pack into your install files, and burn a new disc - Bootcamp is very picky about this). Vista can't be an upgraded or multi-disk copy, either, per Apple. It must be a full version.

If you get Parallels, or VMWare Fusion (both $79), you can emulate Windows inside of OS X nicely. Parallels will let you boot Windows off of your Bootcamp partition inside of OS X (VMWare has the same functionality).

You can have OS X, XP, Vista, Linux, and Solaris all running at the same time, side-by-side. Though only one of the Windows OS's can be loaded from your Bootcamp partition.

3D acceleration will suffer, and speed will be reduced inside a virtual machine, of course. Lots of RAM is needed too (2GB min on the Mac).

Do note that Mac OS X 10.5 is going to be out in about a month or two, replacing OS X 10.4. If you don't buy until then, you'll get it for free, versus having to pay about $129 for it. It'll have non-beta Bootcamp support, and some other niceties like a nice backup function and such.

[Kemper_Boyd]

Any way to do dual monitors, maybe through a docking station?

Assuming you mean two external monitors there are few options.

Matrox have a Mac driver for the DualHead2Go and TripleHead2Go.
http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/gxm/products/dh2go/

In theory you should be able to get ExpressCard video boards but
nobody is selling them yet. DisplayLink have some USB to video
hardware but no Mac driver at the moment.

[Misfit]

Thanks for the tips Dave! Very helpful indeed.

Kemper, yes that is what I mean and my searches were just turning up the matrox solution. I shall investigate further. Thanks.

[Dave]

@Kemper_Boyd, cool find that is! Now I need to bill you for the additional LCD I might now have to buy.

[Misfit]

@Kemper_Boyd, cool find that is! Now I need to bill you for the additional LCD I might now have to buy.

It's over $200 for the digital version though, and that's ebay prices! The analog version can be picked up quite cheaply, but it won't cope with the resolution on my 24" Dell.

Oddly it looks like the digital version takes an analogue signal from the laptop!

[SilverBrumby]

Don't suppose it can have Vista, XP and OS X all installed at the same time?

My wife is using http://refit.sourceforge.net/ to triple boot OS X, XP and Linux. It looks like it could handle Vista too, if you can get it onto another partition.
Of course there's all the usual warnings about using early versions of open source projects, but it seems to be working nicely.

[PaulCunningham]

I'll just add that OEM versions of Vista (Home Pro) bootcamp fine. I'm pretty sure one of the versions doesn't though (maybe Business) .