Laptops Apple MacBook Query.

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egobrain.exe

egobrain.exe

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Hey Guys,

This may not be a new question for you guys, but as i am unaware of this i would like to have some answers and clarifications.

1. As i've heard, that no cracked softwares or games can run on Apple OS/MacBook. Is this fact true? They say that we cant play pirated games and install unauthorized software.

2. When i went to a survey in the market, I came across 2 kinds of Books. One, with 1 year warranty. And another with 2 years international warranty. Where in the @ years one is cheaper than the 1 year one.

3. Should one buy a MacBook only from an authorized Apple store or it can be bought from any dealer. Is there any chances or fake/duplicate MacBooks available?

4. Is it really worth the price?

5. And, is the Apple OS difficult to operate for a newbie? How different is it from Windows?

Would like a healthy answer explaining me everything about MacBooks in details. Specially please clarify the first point. TIA

Regards,
egoB!
 
  1. Don't know about the games but I'm pretty sure you can't pirate Apps available on the Mac app store. As for the rest - I'm sure someone with more experience will elaborate this further for you.
  2. All Mac notebooks come with one year international AppleCare warranty. You can extend this to three years by purchasing ACPP extension.
  3. Better to buy through an Apple authorized seller. eBay is another option if you want to buy it for cheap.
  4. Depends on how you value the features. Personally, i'd say they're worth it - mainly for excellent battery life, large multi-touch glass trackpad, excellent build quality, screen quality and weight.
  5. For the most part, OS X is completely different from windows but learning curve isn't steep at all.

Which Apple notebook should I buy?
 
1. Everything is available, you just need to have right resources to find them.

2. There is no MB with 2 year warranty. What Styx said is only applicable.

3. Styx is right here too.

4. Apple hardware is way ahead of the competitors and for this they charge premium. So, if you're kind of person who thins the premium is justified that it is actually VFM. For instance, I cannot go back to windows laptop only for one reason that I cannot operate their trackpads. I need mouse with Win laptop.

5. You get used to it eventually. but you may get a little disappointed at lack of availability of softwares for Mac OS.

I am a Mac user since only 1 year, but I can say after using Macbook pro, that windows is slightly better than Mac OS ( softwares, GUI, experience ) but MBP hardware is best you can get.
 
^^Apple hardware is NOT way ahead of the competitors,it is the brilliant hw-sw integration that gives apple an edge.

The MBP hardware you are talking about is available for 25k in a windows laptop(I mean WTF!!The 13 incher from spring 2010 has the old c2d!!you call it the best!!BTW I am using it too)what makes it good,is the brilliant o.sX.

If you find win7 better,you have not explored snow leopard extensively.MS is just playing catching up game here.
 
I also reiterate what red dragon said,but apple is has moved to sandy bridge now,keeping abreast of the competition.

1.They are available,you need to look for the correct sources.

2.What Styx said is 100% correct,1 year Apple care,and you can extend it to another 2 years by buying Apple care(which is worth it).

3.Couple of my friends got it from ebay,just search for the right deals

4.That is totally subjective,go to the store,use it. Make an informed decision,I'm a mac user,so I'd say go for it.

The build quality is top notch,backlit keyboard is awesome,easy 7 hours of battery life,and everything just works.

5.What Styx said echoes here too,It's different(not Bingo style :P). It will definitely take some time to get used to,but once you go mac,you will not look back :)
 
red dragon said:
^^Apple hardware is NOT way ahead of the competitors......
Click to expand...
Well, as a matter of fact, Apple hardware is and will always remain ahead of its counterparts not in the terms of CPU specs but in the terms of industrial design and attention to detail.

The precisely designed aluminum unibody enclosure, the magnetic magsafe connector, the invisible sleep indicator, the magnetic latch, the large multi-touch glass trackpad are the among the features Apple has perfected over years and they're also a part of what makes for a great user experience.

In full agreement with the other thing you said though, Apple's hardware-software integration is indeed unparalleled.

Another thing I'd like to mention is the quality of third-party Apps on a Mac. Now there are both good and bad examples, in terms of UI/UX design, but generally what I have found and experienced is that a lot of Mac apps exhibit careful consideration of UI/UX design guidelines and a lot of developers strive for the same standards Apple has set with its stock apps. You probably won't find a lot of apps on other platforms that look and function as elegantly as these:

Marketcircle | Billings - Professional Time Billing for Anyone

Things - task management on the Mac

Versions - Mac Subversion Client (SVN)

Panic - Transmit - The ultimate Mac OS X FTP + SFTP + S3 app

Panic - Coda - One-Window Web Development for Mac OS X
 
red dragon said:
If you find win7 better,you have not explored snow leopard extensively.MS is just playing catching up game here.
Click to expand...
I think this is completely dependent on your usage scenario and of course, opinion. OS X is pretty damn useless for a lot of usage scenarios. In my industry, OS X is the dominant platform, and many of my clients insist that I use OS X. Believe me, I have used every nook and corner of Snow Leopard.

But personally, I would always stick to Windows 7, there is no turning back. OS X seems like a primitive piece of software in comparison. It is great for casual use, but not for my professional heavy-duty use. Here's a small example of why Windows 7 is better - take a software I use daily - Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 - which is available in both Mac OS X and Windows 7. The Windows 7 version is a good 10% faster than Mac OS X with the same hardware using Boot Camp. Moving on, Quicktime X sucks really, really badly. On the Windows 7 side we have an incredible platform called AVISynth. We have lossless codecs. We have Direct3D acceleration for transform and effects. There's also a heavy requirement for multi-tasking, sometimes between 20-30 windows. The Windows taskbar and Aero Peek is far better. Expose is useless and looking through the dock is tiresome. The Alt+Tab is from Windows 95. You can't get rid of the top bar! What a waste of precious real estate. You can't even have full screen apps - it's been an essential feature for me since Windows 95! Where is maximise? Where is cut+paste in Finder!? Security is a concern for me - where's DEP? Windows 7 has been proven to be a more secure OS than Snow Leopard. In fact, Snow Leopard is consistently the first to fall in hacking competitions - easy pickings, the hackers would say. So, for my usage, Windows 7 is simply far superior than Snow Leopard in every which way.

Oh, did I mention that for my usage I need to keep up to date with power, flexibility and performance? Nothing offered by the incredibly closed platform of OS X. For example, CS5.5 is heavily CUDA accelerated. Where do I have the choice for using a NVIDIA GPU? I could go on and on. Not to mention that I play games too. I am not even accounting for cost here - I simply need the best platform.

I would obviously understand how it could be a better choice for a different situation for a different person. But to think "MS is playing catching up game here" is simply naiive and biased. Just to give you an idea, the said full screen apps will finally release in Lion, a good 15 years after Windows. So, who's really playing catch up, then? In reality, all software are influenced by each other.

But of course, you have a point with the hardware. Apple does not make any hardware - the same manufacturers of components also supply components to other OEMs. Macbook's aesthetic design is top notch though. I think what happens is that Macbooks are often compared to laptops half their price, with inferior build quality and half battery capacities to save costs. After all, Apple does not make any cheap laptops. Comparing like-for-like - maybe a fully specced out Dell XPS 15z, you will realize that in terms of build quality, the body is actually made by the same manufacturer! (I forget the name - some company in Taiwan) They are assembled at the same place too, Foxconn. One just looks slightly different from the other.
 
So that makes most of the doubts cleared. So does the MacBook also have Apps in its AppStore just like iPhones? And also, just to confirm can i play pirated games on a MacBook?
 
egobrain.exe said:
So that makes most of the doubts cleared. So does the MacBook also have Apps in its AppStore just like iPhones? And also, just to confirm can i play pirated games on a MacBook?
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There's been a Mac App Store since late last year, but it's rather half-baked. The upcoming Lion integrates App Store properly, and that's where you will be able to buy apps - just like in iOS.

First of all, very few games are available on OS X to begin with. The ones which are are OpenGL ports and run significantly slower with lesser IQ and a lot more bugs than their Windows DX counterparts. On top of which graphics drivers for Mac are extremely flaky. In short, don't play games on Mac OS X, it makes no sense whatsoever.
 
One of the reasons I am buying a Mac is to avoid gaming which I can do pretty fanatically...

A Macbook pro is not for gaming.... Although Steam is intergrated pretty well with Source 2 Engine games with Mac OS... So CSS, TF2 and HL2 should run fine
 
@Sub,you are 100%right,I was absolutely talking from my perspective only.I am not exactly apple fan boy,but for my kind of usage I find O.S X far more stable.

No bloated registry,no slow downs after months of constant use,very rare crashes and what I love most is that I don`t have to shut it down every couple of days.
 
red dragon said:
No bloated registry,no slow downs after months of constant use,very rare crashes and what I love most is that I don`t have to shut it down every couple of days.
Click to expand...
I see that you are comparing Windows XP (which does have the problems you state), a 10 year old Operating system to an Apple OS which is never more than 2-3 years old. If you are seeing the same problems with Windows 7, you are doing something very very wrong.
 
whatsinaname said:
I see that you are comparing Windows XP (which does have the problems you state), a 10 year old Operating system to an Apple OS which is never more than 2-3 years old. If you are seeing the same problems with Windows 7, you are doing something very very wrong.
Click to expand...
Absolutely. I NEVER shut down, unless it's for an installation or update. I have gone a month without a shut down. There's always some render or something happening, and it's all heavy duty work. I don't see any slow down whatsoever. I don't see any crashes. (Unless while using a buggy software, but that is true for any OS.)

This is what happens often - people compare the latest Mac OS X to ancient Windows versions; they compare their shiny Rs. 1 lakh iMac to their previous el-cheapo badly configured Rs. 20k assembled desktop, etc. That's Apple's best strategy - don't sell cheap stuff. If you have to sell cheap stuff, put it in a nice looking shell and overprice it.
 
Try running windows 7 on a laptop for a month,just close the lid to put it to sleep for a month or so and report back.

--- Updated Post - Automerged ---

Regarding overpricing,do you guys find thinkpads overpriced?The most basic T410(first gen i3,3gigs RAM,without o.s) costs 58k,that too without tax...and we think only macs are overpriced.
 
red dragon said:
Try running windows 7 on a laptop for a month,just close the lid to put it to sleep for a month or so and report back.

--- Updated Post - Automerged ---

Regarding overpricing,do you guys find thinkpads overpriced?The most basic T410(first gen i3,3gigs RAM,without o.s) costs 58k,that too without tax...and we think only macs are overpriced.
Click to expand...
First, Macs are not overpriced for what they offer. (Maybe there is a case for the calling the higher end MacBooks expensive, but most of the other products, definitely no).

Second, I use Windows 7 on my Tablet PC. It has a ULV Intel C2d processor (not very powerful) and a normal HDD (not an SSD). I use it a lot. When I am travelling, demonstrating to clients, taking notes in meetings. I almost always keep it in the 'lid closed' mode as I like having quick access to my tablet. No slowdowns, no bloat, great battery life. 1 year of usage.

What I did do was, as soon as I bought the laptop, remove all the HP bloatware.
 
Even i am using Windows Seven on my Vaio, which has a C2D processor and a normal HDD and i keep it on throughout like for months and ive not yet come across such bugs a crashes whatsoever. My laptop is kept on throughout, as i keep on downloading TV shows and other various stuff with the display kept off.

Ive used a MacBook Pro which is one of my friend's. And i felt like snapping it up as soon as possible. Now lets see. But i'm sure of switching to MBP very soon!
 
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