Do Macbooks get bogged down easily?

[woofwoofwoof]

My sister is considering buying a MacBook and I'm worried it might be too slow.

I've been a regular user of Powerbooks, MacBook Pros and Mac Pros since 1999. It's usually been with high end stuff. Currently at my job we use 2.2 GHz MacBook Pros mainly for Adobe software.

There was a brief period once where we switched to iBooks, and it was a terrible, terrible experience. The computers literally could not handle the weight of photoshop, and the whole OS seemed to run in slow motion. Granted it was out IT department's fault for under buying, but I still blame Apple a little for putting so little into their entry level product.

I know the specs are higher on the MacBook, but I don't want my sister to buy one only to have it enter slow motion mode when she tries to open more than a handful of photos at once. I have ZERO experience with MacBooks, have they improved dramatically since the iMac days?

I'm not talking about putting them through the ultimate stress test. Can a MacBook handle a few 12 megapixel images in Photoshop while VLC is running at the same time without slowing down noticeably?

 

[queshy]

I haven't tried the latest aluminum MacBooks, but even the "old" white ones (C2D) were very fast. Tell her to go to the Apple store and check one out? A Mac should perform just as fast as a PC (perhaps faster) with similar hardware. Remember...a Mac has pretty much all the same innards as a PC.

 

[woofwoofwoof]

Do you think the new white MacBook will have trouble upgrading to Snow Leopard?

 

[yousoldtheworld]

My aluminum macbook does not get bogged down at all, running photoshop or anything else I throw at it.

The new ones are closer in performance to the pros, by far.

 

[Scottsdale]

Do you think the new white MacBook will have trouble upgrading to Snow Leopard?

The new white one, released on Monday, has Nvidia graphics. With this the new WhiteBook will run graphics just like the aluminum MBs do (except slightly slower RAM). But still, the new WhiteBook should be REALLY FAST. All of the MacBooks are fast, even the MacBook Air is fast now. With the Intel Core 2 Duo chip, and the Nvidia graphics, it should do normal tasks really fast.

Definitely buy it. Or, can buy a refurbished aluminum MB on apple.com in the mac refurbished section for only $1099. Check there every day as they are available off and on all of the time.

 

[LouisBlack]

Remember that the high level MacBook uses the same processor and RAM as the entry level Macbook Pro. They are very similar if you're not running 3D tasks or in need of FireWire. Even the lowliest Macbook is faster than my iMac and I routinely edit HD video on that.