Desktop PC or Macbook Pro?
Archives Forums/General Discussion/Desktop PC or Macbook Pro?
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| [edit] I meant this to go in the general discussion forum. D'oh! [/edit] I've been looking at PCs for around the £1500-£1800 mark, but a friend just got a Macbook Pro for £1700 and I'm wondering what to do. I mainly want it for video editing, games and programming. I really like Final Cut Pro as opposed to Premiere etc, and his macbook could run DVCProHD footage which is important to me. I also like the OSX experience, and to have that and Windows in the same machine sounds great. Any of you have experience of running Windows on a Macbook Pro? How's it compare, games-wise, to a decent modern desktop PC? One thing I would be able to get a lot more of in a desktop, is fast hard drive space which would be a bonus for editing - although the macbook pro has a Firewire 800 port. Ideally I'd get a Mac Pro but that's just silly money. One good thing about getting a macbook pro would be running a two monitor setup as I already have a flatscreen for my PC (or would I have a problem setting that up?) God, I don't know... |
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| Dude, get the Mac you won't be disappointed. It's sounds like your into video editing, macs are great for this, and Final Cut is the cheapest and best solution for indie films. Not to mention all the other great things OSX has to offer in this realm. OSX rules by the way! As far as gaming, obviously you can only do so much with a laptop. However I can speak from personal experience with my Macbook, and say it out performs similarly classed PC hardware both in Windows and OSX. It runs windows better than a regular PC. And its portable. The possibility of running all three of the Todays major OSes on one machine makes the Mac the best value laptop hands down. Software is key to making a machine worth the price. If something comes out for XP, Vista, OSX or Linux that you just have to have, your set. And if you don't like having to reboot to switch OSes, just buy Parallels Desktop, and you can run instances of Different OSes right inside OSX at almost native speeds thanks to the dual core proc. Then there is the whole idea of being able to test your BlitzMax apps on each platform. That in itself can save you a bunch of time. And besides name me one laptop that give you a built-in video camera/mic, beautiful case, wonderful draft 11n wireless capabilities, backlit keyboard, and many other features that no other manufacture thinks about. If you need fast hard disk accessing get an external firewire 800 drive, or a dual firewire drive, that should take care of that. Dual screen support is superb on the Macbook Pro. I'm telling you, it would be your best bet. |
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| The Mac. |
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| Macbook Pro = Mac + XP(if you use bootcamp) |
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| Jeez, will you all stop sitting on the fence and just give me your opinion? ;) I hear you about OSX. So easy and intuitive compared to XP, especially things like networking. Thanks for the info altitudems - so a FW800 drive will be good enough for HD video editing? I don't need to go with a performance striped raid array of SATAs? I was surprised that HD footage played well on my friend's, seeing as the drive is only a 2.5inch 5400rpm model - and the larger option drive is a 4200rpm. Am I right in thinking that video editing might be a bit rough on the main hard drive and that I should use a separate AV drive? Also, are there any particular external hard drives that work very well with the mac? I'm fairly partial to Maxtor Onetouch myself. I'm pretty much sold... and seeing as I doubt we'll see a price drop in January, my credit card is already getting pre-Xmas itchy... although I'll hold a few days at least to see if anyone's got a strong opinion the other way (aside from price). |
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| Get a Mac. You won't be disappointed. When my brother, who has been a long tem PC user, wanted to get a laptop, I suggested him to get a MacBook, as he would continue using Windows XP and also try OSX. Today, he does not use XP for anything except games. |
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| And the macbook pro would run the latest games well? Oblivion, Battlefield 2 and 2142, and Quake Wars when it comes out? I'm looking at the pro with the 2.33ghz chip and 2gb RAM, the ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 with 256MB of GDDR3 SDRAM and the 160gb 5400rpm HD. |
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