2 questions (office and hard drive)

[Imprezive]

Before I buy my first mac in about 15 years, I've been looking around to see if there is anything extra that I may want or need.

My first question is about Microsoft office. How necessary is it to have it over iworks? I see mixed reviews about iworks, specifically numbers, and am not sure if I will Need to purchase office.

About the drive, I figured I would get the 256gb MacBook Pro and just have an external hard drive. Coming off of my first laptop that had the hard drive fail, I wonder if it's safe to have an external HD or if I need to have a SSD hard drive.

Thank you for any answers.

 

[satcomer]

1. Well there is Office for Mac but now with the subscription costs IMHO is driving customers & small businesses away for that product. Then some the OS X alternatives are LibreOffice or NeoOffice.

2. Depends. Some tests have shown for consumer direct connections USB3 drives are just a hair slower than the first generation Thunderbolt drives. I guess it all was down to the speed or the external spinning drive and internal chip.

IMHO you should invest in something like the DS214Play if you plan pictures and video sharing on your network or connect VPN back to your network.