Re: MacBook buying advice?

["Warren Sirota" <wsirota@wsdesigns.com>]

I'm running on a Macbook, non-pro, that I got in early 2007. I enjoy generally working in OSX, and I really like Logic BUT.... i really see the advantage in cross-platform things, and all the marvelous Logic synths and fx are not only not available if you have to switch over to Windows for some reason, but they're not even available as AU so you can use them in other programs. Probably copy protection is at the root of this. (OTOH, with Live and Max/msp, both protected, i can work on whatever OS is at hand). No regrets about my Macbook purchase - at the time, you couldn't get a core2duo windows laptop any cheaper than the macbook i got.

Applecare, btw, is marvellous. I have spent well over an hour on the phone with a hard-core techie guiding me through typing in Darwin shell commands to fix a very weird problem with my boot camp partition - you get to talk to knowledgeable people, an absolute rarity in the computer industry. ok, it costs $350 (for, i think, 3 years). but no-one should ever buy a laptop w/o an extended warranty, especially a musician, because almost always the connectors are hard-wired to the motherboards, and you don't want to pay to replace a motherboard when the headphone or FW jack stops functioning (I'm getting my Macbook back from the apple store today after they just did this for me for free).

Rick, you know you can boot into OSX from the DVD drive and then try to repair or reinstall the os from there, don't you? And on the boot camp side - well, i think problems there are probably not blameable on apple (except for their weirdly inexplicable omission of tap-clicking from the trackpad driver, which drives me nuts but is not your issue).

best bet for most people now, possibly: a used macbook with FW from ebay.

I can't possibly see enough advantage in OSX over WinXP to attempt of installing OSX on a non-apple machine. if you want cheap, live with Windows. It works just fine, even tho they're stuck with some crazy conventions (like alt-F4 to quit an application).

On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 10:17 AM, Travis Hartnett <travishartnett@gmail.com> wrote:

Well, part of the reason for the "easy out-of-the-box integration" is that the number of possible configurations is controlled by Apple, and thus very small.  You can't buy a Mac without the OS, and they're really all part of the same "product".  Any OS that runs on "commodity hardware" isn't going to be as smooth as the Mac OS experience (and even that isn't, of course, perfect).  Part of what you perceive as the "hardware" cost is the cost of extensively testing that hardware/software combination so that the user experience is as smooth as it is. 

The Mac market isn't made up of people who want deal with EFI bios workarounds and such.  But if that's working for you, great.

TH

On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 2:09 AM, van Sinn <vansinn@post.cybercity.dk> wrote:

George Ludwig wrote:

For those that love MacOS (as I do) but would prefer to run on commodity hardware, check out http://www.hackintosh.org

But it's not for the faint of heart.

Agreed.  There's also insanelymac.whatever  -same story.

To briefly comment: While I really like Apple and OSX, very much for it's ease of out-of-the-box integration, I find their hardware prices overrated, so I consider shopping ordinary PC hardware and install a shopped OSX (not the 'free open' hacked version) using boot123, which is an EFI bios workaround.