Hardware So thinking about getting a Mac for college

[murkurie]

Not sure why you say no HP, I'll still recommend it. As seeing as the mac doesn't meet your screen requirement have you though about the HP Envy 14? I use a envy 17 and as seeing the Envy is HP flagship model build quality is outstanding, and they have performance if your willing to sacrifice battery life. which you should be if you want a desktop replacement I feel.

http://www.squaretrade.com/htm/pdf/SquareT...bility_1109.pdf

Here is a report by a warranty company. HP had a failure rate of over 25%. That's just sad.

Anyway, I don't know what you're running, but 1366x768 is certainly not enough to have Premiere/After Effects run side by side, or an API and NetBeans run side by side. CAD does not do particularily well on a low resolution either. Vertical scrollbars appear and nothing is possible without frustration anymore. Like I said, I'm a "power user"... I need the power to run top level programs when plugged in, and battery life to take notes in class.

Did you notice, HP sells the most and has highest failure rate, the company's that tied for 2nd place in sales, had the 2 most failures. And I don't think that is a random coincidence.

and yes I agree 1366X768 is small, which is why I use 3 monitors at home for programming, Visual Studios on one, the class assignment on another, and usually Visual Studios opened another time, for looking at past work or my class notes opened.

 

[nutella]

I'm a "power user"... I need the power to run top level programs when plugged in, and battery life to take notes in class.

That's not what a power user is, but that's beside the point. I still recommend a multi-monitor setup regardless of what resolution you have, if even just for home use. Though, that depends how much you'll be at home, but it's always useful. You should probably dual boot with Windows as well or use a virtual machine. Wine isn't all that great in comparison as far as performance and compatibility go.

 

[Mangofett]

I'm a "power user"... I need the power to run top level programs when plugged in, and battery life to take notes in class.
That's not what a power user is, but that's beside the point. I still recommend a multi-monitor setup regardless of what resolution you have, if even just for home use. Though, that depends how much you'll be at home, but it's always useful. You should probably dual boot with Windows as well or use a virtual machine. Wine isn't all that great in comparison as far as performance and compatibility go.

http://www.techterms.com/definition/poweruser

I'm bringing a monitor to my dorm, yes

QUOTE

Did you notice, HP sells the most and has highest failure rate, the company's that tied for 2nd place in sales, had the 2 most failures. And I don't think that is a random coincidence.

That only proves that they're making more mistakes in manufacturing because they pump out more systems. So that point is quite invalid. Since the statistic is a percentage, the population size doesn't really matter.

 

[Deleted User]

I'm just going to go out on a limb and tell you this: no good windows-OS/PC laptop that has a strong dedicated graphics card (helpful for your purposes) will give you 7 hours of battery life. The only non-optimal combinations I could think of are probably on par with the 540M Sager (for battery life).

At your budget you're better off just getting a netbook and a notebook. Netbook for when you need battery life and notebook for when you need portable desktop power.

The Sager 8130/8150/8170 (from XoticPC) blow Mac's out of the freaking water. You'll be looking at base-price @ a 1920x1080 resolution monitor (15.6''), 4GB of RAM, GTX 460M GPU, and a i7-2630QM 2nd Generation Quad Core i7-Processor. Apple over charges for EVERYTHING without telling you specifically what you're paying for or what you're actually upgrading to.

To be honest, Sager/Clevo model laptops are more upgradable than Apple Macbooks, so I would definitely go with a PC in this regard; if you find you need more power all you really have to do is contact the re-seller/supplier (or even Ebay in this regard) in terms of a Processor/GPU upgrade.