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Haven't touched Mac in 15 years, need advice...

J

joeysarks

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 21, 2011
122
0
Detroit
Switching to mac after 20 years of windows/pc. Need some advice on what I should be looking at. Basically my computer use will mainly consist of...

-Web browsing
-Djing, audio production (Serato or Traktor, Ableton all internal work)
-Programming (html but might go back to school for CS soon)
-World of Warcraft (just sometimes for fun, I keep stuff mostly at medium setting)
-Blu-ray

Now from what I've heard blu-ray is never gonna happen on Mac, so i've decided to snag a ps3 or other player instead. I'm selling my desktop and old laptop but i'm keeping the 24 inch monitor which leaves me the option to get a 13 inch macbook pro.

Basically I need to know if the 2.3 ghz 13 inch will be enough or should I shell out extra for the 2.7 i7, and should I maybe get something like a Mac Mini on the side as well so i'm not burning up my laptop as fast? Does anyone even use those I swear i've never seen one before.
 
the 13" MBP is a good place to start ... don't worry about burning it out ... it is a little tank
 
How do these SSD drives run, worth the extra loot? I've used em in the past and they always ran really slow, slower than my 7200rpm drive anyways.
 
joeysarks said:
Switching to mac after 20 years of windows/pc. Need some advice on what I should be looking at. Basically my computer use will mainly consist of...

-Web browsing
-Djing, audio production (Serato or Traktor, Ableton all internal work)
-Programming (html but might go back to school for CS soon)
-World of Warcraft (just sometimes for fun, I keep stuff mostly at medium setting)
-Blu-ray

Now from what I've heard blu-ray is never gonna happen on Mac, so i've decided to snag a ps3 or other player instead. I'm selling my desktop and old laptop but i'm keeping the 24 inch monitor which leaves me the option to get a 13 inch macbook pro.

Basically I need to know if the 2.3 ghz 13 inch will be enough or should I shell out extra for the 2.7 i7, and should I maybe get something like a Mac Mini on the side as well so i'm not burning up my laptop as fast? Does anyone even use those I swear i've never seen one before.
Click to expand...

If you want a portable, the 13" has a sweet size with great power (recent Sandy Bridge benchmarks have shown it outperforming bigger brothers from previous MBP generations by a good margin) - however, if gaming is on your horizon, the 15" with dedicated GPU is better.

Otherwise, the Mac Mini should be more than enough for your needs above; the iMac is, of course, much better but comes with a (wonderful IPS) screen, something you may not wish to have now.
 
saxondale. said:
Are you sure about that? I doubt any SSD on the market is slower than a 7200rpm drive.
Click to expand...

Well when it comes to copying files from one drive to another it always seemed slower between sd and hd rather than hd to hd. Course I haven't used em in a while though I guess it's worth another shot.

I dig the cooler, lighter, energy saving benefits of it too, more healthy battery life as well. BTW if I ever need a battery/hard drive/etc replaced I have to take it into apple and have them switch it out right? Cept for ram everything has to be replaced by apple? I heard different info on hard drives didn't know which was true.
 
And can I get a disc drive now and upgrade to flash later or do I have to start with a flash drive?
 
There are several good ssd's out now that are faster than a mechanical hd. It was not that long, only about a year or two ago, that many were often slower than a hd in common scenarios. You can find good recommendations here.

It is pretty straight forward to upgrade to a SSD on a macbook, macbook pro, or mac pro. iMacs are difficult and macbook airs take a special form factor of ssd.

Keep in mind, that you won't have trim available when upgrading the drive (though, it may come later) and that you still should be careful when selecting a ssd because there are still some some bad ones and ones that won't work optimally with a mac because of the lack of trim.
 
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My 2010 MacBook Pro 13" has been "pimped" its a great little work horse never lets me down, admittedly i have upgraded both the memory and hard drive, see sig... its great out performs my 2011 MacBook Pro 13" the hybrid hard drives are great and can take alot of abuse
 
You already figured out correctly that Apple isn't planning to implement Blu-ray functionality anytime soon. Since you intend to use a PS3 or something else as a standalone Blu-ray player you simply have to figure out whether you want to be mobile.
I, personally, experienced this can be quite an important aspect. Just ordered a 15" MBP with SSD. Waiting for it to arrive but from what i've seen SSDs are really(!!!) incredible. I mean REALLY. If you store your mass data externally and don't need it everywhere and all the time: get one. Really.
 
I also recommend the 13 base i5 MBP. I would also go ahead and upgrade the RAM and hard drive. I upgraded my MBP to 8 gb RAM and a 500 gb hard drive.
 
:)
NeoMac said:
I also recommend the 13 base i5 MBP. I would also go ahead and upgrade the RAM and hard drive. I upgraded my MBP to 8 gb RAM and a 500 gb hard drive.
Click to expand...

Not to sound like an echo, but your system choice seems to be a 13" i5 MBP. It'll do just about all the gaming you need out of WoW (which really doesn't need a 15" dedicated GFX card), and should provide enough power for all of your audio needs. Picking up a MacBook Air could also provide all of that too, although performance would suffer on gaming for sure, and you wouldn't be able to do a whole lot of audio production, but it's a beautiful machine.. :)

Oh, also, don't upgrade the RAM from Apple. sure, they've reduced their prices, but it's still expensive. You can do better on the 3rd party circuit.
 
Thanks for all the help guys. Been researching still, I think what i'm goin to do is get the baseline 13" since I heard the benchmark from 2.3 to 2.7ghz isn't all that much of an increase. I'll prolly get a hdd drive and upgrade it myself with one of these ssds since i've read it doesn't void warrenty.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100008120%2050001077&IsNodeId=1&name=SAMSUNG

I also read that jumping from 4gb of ram to 8gb isn't very noticeable with a solid state drive so can I skip that? Or was that advice intended for people doing general purpose use and not heavy program use?

Aside from all that, I read finder is a pain and I will have to use iTunes for everything from playing media to sorting it. Seems like a pain sorting in iTunes having it all in one spot and making playlists for different things....unless im missing something it seems more annoying than folder style management which I already hate:(
 
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