Future Computer Purchase

So, for the past month or so I've been toying with the idea of selling my desktop and getting a laptop for school and for travel.

I've been into PCs my entire life, but a friend of mine has me interested in Macs for the first time ever. Now I know that debates over which is better can get pretty heated, so I'm not going to ask that question.

What I want to know is, for simple usage, ie. photoshop, mp3 playing, surfing, and word processing, what's the best bang for my buck? Keep in mind I don't want to spend a gazillion dollars on a computer. I really don't know TONS about computers, so keep things simple, I need a new best friend.

If you don't want to spend a gazillion dollars, get a PC. We're slower, dumber, uglier, and generally drop our prices by half every eighteen months.

That means you can get an almost-top-o-the-line PC laptop for super cheap. What you could especially do is go around to Best Buy and Circuit City and ask if they have any open-box specials. They usually sell their display laptops near the end of that 18 months for about a 1/3 of the original price. If you can catch it before an employee claims it, it's a great deal. I don't know about Best Buy, but I know Circuit City's display computers still fall under the one-year warranty, too, that starts when you buy it, so that's even better.

one day...]

[Edited on Dec 05, 2003 by hyparxis]

Here's my criteria:

PC -> games, application development

Mac -> graphics/video, web development

So for your uses, I'd say get a Mac. Care to buy me one as well?

Either way, unless selling your computer is a necessity for purchasing the laptop, you might not want to get rid of it. They tend to be more powerful (unless your desktop is uber-ancient), and they're easier to upgrade. If you're not going to be home much, then it probably won't do you much good either.

You would be suprised at the number of nifty gizmos (I love tech terms) you can cram into a 2 foot tower

No, I don't have to sell mine, I just didn't see the point in having two computers.

Wha...? There's always a point in having two computers. The point is... to have two computers! Duh!

Hell, I'm getting ready to start preparing to maybe getting around to begin building a third. It's going to be in an old Nintendo case. It'll probably be done when I'm twenty-five, but someday it will be done.

And the Lord said that it will kick ass, and He saw that it will kick ass, and that ass-kicking was good.

Yea, do you job as a gluttenous American and have THREE computer!

I'll just assume you put all the necessary "r"s and "s"s in there and say, Yes, I will.

By the way, From, your spelling sucks.

Not that that's not ok, mind you. Just had to comment on it, because I'm an ass.

HEY THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT MY FUCKING COMPUTER!!!!!!

Purdier? Yes
Faster? No

Check out this month's MaximumPC magazine for the Intel, AMD, Mac benchmark showdown. Intel beat out both the AMD 64 bit and the Mac G5. The Mac also proved that it is not meant for gaming. AMD and Intel's benchmark framerates were 317% (yes...317%) higher than the G5 with the exact same Radeon 9800 Pro card.

Anywho...for what she's planning to do I would go with a Mac. Anything more strenuous than playing mp3s or Photoshopping then I'd say a PC.

I just went through the whole "buying a new computer" thing.

I don't play games on my computer at all. I need it mostly for word processing, web surfing, MP3 downloading, DVD burning, and when I get a digital camera, photoshopping.

I researched the hell out of it, and ultimately what I came up with is that (as Flux already said) Mac is the way to go. For school purposes, I don't think you need a G5, which is really expensive anyhow.

As far as pricing, what I also discovered is that buying anything directly from Apple is fucking EXPENSIVE. After even more searching, I discovered that J & R Computer World in NY has what estimate to be the cheapest prices around. Plus, if you don't live in NY you don't get charged sales tax. Even with paying for shipping, that's still cheaper than you'd pay if you bought it locally and had to pay sales tax.

Here is the link to the J & R site. There are also really easy to understand magazines out there that rate everything and compare PC to Mac with easy to follow bar charts. One really good one I found was a British magazine called "Macworld."

don't buy a toshiba laptop. they have issues with overheating.

Since your needs are pretty basic almost anything will probably do. If you're working Photoshop, you'll want to stack on as much RAM as you can. On the Mac side a G4 iBook will run you between $1100 and $1500. The iBook is a little less than ideal for PS work since the memory will bottleneck, but if you aren't doing anything too crazy, you shouldn't be hurting too badly. The iBooks were also updated very recently, so you can buy with some confidence that you won't be seeing something better for probably another three or four months.

On the PC side you can find a lot of vendors with laptops good for your needs for probably between $900 and $1500. Dell's 5100 and 5150 series are pretty compelling at that price point. Not nearly as nice to look at as the Macs, but what can you do--other than look at Vaios and pay for the Sony name? I'm currently trying to weasel my way into a Z1VAP2 at work.

Whatever you do, make sure to get wireless networking added in. Wi-Fi (802.11b) capability would be acceptable, but 802.11g would be ideal (both for forward and backward compatibility).

Dell computers are a great option.........

[Edited on Dec 05, 2003 by topbanana66]

Yeah, just get a dell laptop.

The idea that you need a mac to do video and digital imaging is bullshit. You can do everything with a PC laptop that you can do with a mac laptop (and then some) at a much lower price. My friend has a dell and it seems to be working for him just fine, he uses it in his business where he does digital imaging to make t-shirts. So yeah, pick up a nice dell laptop.

PC user all my life. But if your looking for graphic usage good MAC. For other stuff and some graphics go PC.

I agree. I have two Dells and they have been great. I do have a super, supped up G4 for film and video editing, but that's for professional level shit. I would go with a Dell for most normal use.

I have a Toshiba laptop. When I read the thing above about "overheating", I plopped it into my lap just to see. It's completely cool, and it's been running for about an hour now on the battery.

What amused me about buying a computer last time I did it is that everyone has a brand that they swear sucks, and you should never buy it. "Oh, Dells use crappy hard drives." "Oh, Compaq's tech support blows." "Oh, Gateways catch fire occasionally". I think you have to kind of look past those stories, and go with what matches your requirements the best for the money you want to spend.

I hope you're kidding about the application development bit. If you're getting a PC (and by "PC", I mean "Windows Box", not any flavor of unix), application development is pretty much out of the question. Shell over a few hundred bucks to MS for their broken-ass compiler and clown-suit IDE? Otherwise, yeah, completely agreed.
OS X now -comes- with all the apple developer tools pre-installed, so it's just as good as my linux box as far as development goes. IMO, if you like games, get a windows machine. Otherwise, go with linux or a mac.

That being said, I recently bought a new mac iBook. This is the third laptop I've owned. The first one was an Acer laptop which my school made me buy (our school requires all freshmen to buy a laptop from them, so I didn't have much say in the make/model of the laptop). It was pretty good for the first year. After year 1, everyone's battery died. Great. I went through 2 hard drives (burned out one sophomore year, one the year after), an extra CPU (burned it out running a cpu-intensive application for 3 days straight), 2 motherboards (sound board fried on one, roomie spilled a big glass of water on my machine... jerk!). Fortunately, all of that shit was covered by warranty except for the battery. The machine is four years old now, and it's too slow to do anything except run basic user applications. At the end of year three, it was running linux, and I used it mostly to connect to remote boxes and do work there. My sister then needed a machine, so it got donated to her. All in all, it wasn't a bad laptop, but I probably would have been very ticked if it wasn't covered under the warranty.
When my acer was three years old, a friend of mine gave me a spare laptop he had sitting around. It was a g3 powerbook, 233Mhz proc, 160Mb ram. Apple has since discontinued support for this model as of 10.3. This laptop was an extra year older than my acer. My friend had found it in a garbage pile from a private high school and salvaged it. All of the hardware worked fine, and the battery still got three full hours of life. Doing intensive development was kind of painful, since the processor was kind of slow, but it ran safari and mail and everything else really quickly. Eventually, I stopped using the linux acer laptop entirely, and was just using this rickety old mac. A few months ago, I tripped on its power adapter chord and sent it crashing to the floor.... all the hardware (display included) was fine, but the power adapter wouldn't go into the back of the laptop to charge it anymore. With the two hours of battery life left on the old mac, I ordered a new iBook.

Apple's laptops are notoriously rugged. As far as the PC market goes, IBM has very good quality. Dell is pretty mediocre, and I've heard nothing but terrible things about HP, Compaq, and any other "deal of the week" machines from best buy or whatnot. People always bitch about apple being too expensive, but honestly, you get what you pay for. If you want a PC laptop that wasn't put together by some 13 year old in korea, then you're going to be paying a price comperable to an apple.

Just my 2 cents....

[Edit to fix a few typos and not make me sound like a raging moron]

[Edited on Dec 06, 2003 by sqook]

If you do happen to get a Dell laptop, avoid the Inspiron lines. As a home user, you get shafted by Dell in every way possible unless you get something as fail-safe as their desktops. Nearly all Inspirons I've dealt with have horrible hardware failure rates compared to their Latitude lines (for businesses). Apparently, Dell reserves their "best" hardware for their Latitudes and the ones that don't make the cutoff go into the Inspirons. That means Dell fucks over people like you and me. No thanks, I'd rather boycott a company like that. If you're going to offer a product, get it right or don't offer it at all. Fucking assholes. Do you want to support assholes? I don't.

Apple laptops have better quality in construction in comparison to PC laptops in my experience (and others). I've had 2 hard drives, 2 CD-RWs, motherboard, and a variety of other things break on ONE Inspiron over a period of 2.5 years - piss-poor job there Dell. Other people have had issues with Inspirons as well requiring hardware replacement. On the other hand, I haven't seen a Latitude break at all. Those things are solid stuff. Good luck getting one new directly from Dell, but you can always lie and say you have a business, but that's against my honesty policy - it may not apply to yours.

Doing digital media and imaging is not better or worse on a Mac, in general. However, PCs are possibly better at some multimedia due to the SSE2 instructions on the P4 - several factors faster in anything that does heavy use of FFTs, DCTs, wavelets (movies, mp3 compression, real-time audio decompression). If you like the interface of Macs better than Windows, then there's no real reason to stick with Windows, right? Now, if you're a game player, then you'll have to have a PC around, but times are changing and more developers are using portable code (ie. Q3, Epic, Maxis).

Apple makes quite a lot of sales because they know sex sells. Don't make such a decision based upon looks.

As a sidenote, I will gladly take any computer. I can use computers in rendering or compile farms, and there's nothing wrong with a few extra nodes, even if they're only used for RAS.

Depending on where you go to school you might be able to get an educational discount from Apple. You go to their website and type in your school . If your school isn't on there maybe you have a best friend or sibling who does go to that school and perhaps they can get it for you and you pay 'em. Take a look into it!

-Sarah