Hi guys,
It's a 10 days out from Christmas and my 10 year old has finally decided he'd like a new-to-him Mac Laptop mostly for skyping and playing minecraft. He's currently playing on my old 13" white Macbook (I think it's from 2009, but I'm not at home to check the specs). Anyway, he's complaining of lag, specifically when he tries to capture video while playing with his friends.
Of course he wants to do a "Let's play" youtube channel.
If he gets a new laptop, it will be used... we probably won't spend more than $400. With this in mind, can anyone give me specs that I should be looking for? I've scanned the minecraft forums on the topic, but most of the discussions become "why do you want to buy a crap Mac when PCs cost less and are made for gaming?" rant fests, which is not helpful. My boy wants a Mac and I just want to get the one that is most likely to work best for him, within our budget...
From my googling, it looks like I should be looking for a Macbook pro, at least 2GB of ram, highest processing rate we can find/afford, and an nVidia graphics card... do you guys agree? It also seems a SSD drive would be better, but I don't think I'm going to find that in our price range, even used...
Oh, also... would an iMac be out of the question in terms of running Minecraft? I saw a couple of 17" iMacs in our price range (not sure of specs) that he might consider, but haven't really seen anyone discuss running Minecraft on them.
Thanks in advance for your helpful input!
It's a 10 days out from Christmas and my 10 year old has finally decided he'd like a new-to-him Mac Laptop mostly for skyping and playing minecraft. He's currently playing on my old 13" white Macbook (I think it's from 2009, but I'm not at home to check the specs). Anyway, he's complaining of lag, specifically when he tries to capture video while playing with his friends.
Of course he wants to do a "Let's play" youtube channel.
If he gets a new laptop, it will be used... we probably won't spend more than $400. With this in mind, can anyone give me specs that I should be looking for? I've scanned the minecraft forums on the topic, but most of the discussions become "why do you want to buy a crap Mac when PCs cost less and are made for gaming?" rant fests, which is not helpful. My boy wants a Mac and I just want to get the one that is most likely to work best for him, within our budget...
From my googling, it looks like I should be looking for a Macbook pro, at least 2GB of ram, highest processing rate we can find/afford, and an nVidia graphics card... do you guys agree? It also seems a SSD drive would be better, but I don't think I'm going to find that in our price range, even used...
Oh, also... would an iMac be out of the question in terms of running Minecraft? I saw a couple of 17" iMacs in our price range (not sure of specs) that he might consider, but haven't really seen anyone discuss running Minecraft on them.
Thanks in advance for your helpful input!
