Ok, I’m thinking about buying a refurbished MacBook Pro off the Apple website and I just wanted a few pointers from the Mac’ers here. (This will be the first Mac that I own.)
How are refurbished Macs, especially MBPs.
Is this a stupid idea? (Be honest.)
I’ve check the MacRumors buying guide and it seems like it’s a good time to buy. Any conflicting views?
I have Photoshop CS2 full for Windows and I don’t want to have to buy CS2/3 for the Mac. What other good options are there? Parallels Fusion, WINE? I’m kind of a dolt in this area.
Is this a stupid idea? (Be honest.)
no, the mac is lovely system to work on, the UI can take a little getting used to if your 100% windows but nothing that will annoy you too much.
I’ve check the MacRumors buying guide and it seems like it’s a good time to buy. Any conflicting views?
I’ve read rumors that Q3 2008 there will be announcement regarding these, I’m not sure how valid they are, but it’s enough to keep me from buying an MBP at the moment (and I really want one)…
@ramie: Thanks for the input, but I really don’t want to wait that long. Besides, if they did something in Q3 2008, it would totally go against their release cycle.
I remember we discussed this in that other notebook buying thread…Refurbished isn’t “used” per-say, so I guess it shouldn’t be a downer to buying one of those, however of course that that with a grain of salt. Also, here’s an important tip. No matter the product cycles, if you need a laptop, and need it now, then why wait. There’s no point in waiting 5-8 months if you need it now.
Refurbs come with the apple warranty still, so even if things go wrong, you’ll be fine.
BUY THE FREAKING EXTENDED APPLE CARE THOUGH
NEVER. NEVER. buy an apple machine with out the extended warranty, believe me, i’ve avoided ~$1000 repair bills more than once.
No matter where the MBP is in its product life cycle, you’re buying a refurb, so … unless you want to wait and wait and wait some more until refurbs of new models come out, then buy now.
Note: apple tends to decrease the price of every new model, so keep that in mind too
ALSO, do not run photoshop in anything but BootCamp
Trying to run two os’s at once AND photoshop… thats just silly
*edit: isn’t bootcamp still a free app? whats the story with that? anyone know?
*edit^2: You know… photoshop runs sooo smoothly and fast when it is native, and you can find student deals on the adobe site, or if you’re not a student, get someone who is and buy it through their school… its worth investigating
^ I was going to buy AppleCare, and you just cemented it in.
Just to clear up, you’re saying that trying to run Photoshop through VMware fusion is an absolute no-no? :q: I’m pretty new to this whole virtualization thing. I really want this to be a development platform, something that I can run multiple OS’s on and get development done anywhere instead of being tied to my desktop. Since I don’t do any big design that often, running Photoshop is not that big of a thing.
EDIT: By the way, thanks a bunch for all of your opinions and help everyone!
OS X takes a certain amount of resources just to run, that could be said for any OS.
Now, when you are running a “virtual” os, you’re essentially running two os’s at once, now, the “virtual” os is limited in its performance, simply because its … running alongside OS X.
Trying to run Photoshop in a virtual os, is possible, but the performance would be hindered … a lot .
BootCamp allows you to shut down, and choose which OS to boot into, so if you install XP (or Vista… ugh) its the same as having a normal PC box, in that all your computers resources are dedicated to running JUST XP
You can run VMware and accomplish every other task you have your heart set on as a development platform, but Photoshop is too ■■■■ big…
[quote=fasterthanlight™;2345607]Ok think about it this way,
OS X takes a certain amount of resources just to run, that could be said for any OS.
Now, when you are running a “virtual” os, you’re essentially running two os’s at once, now, the “virtual” os is limited in its performance, simply because its … running alongside OS X.
Trying to run Photoshop in a virtual os, is possible, but the performance would be hindered … a lot .
BootCamp allows you to shut down, and choose which OS to boot into, so if you install XP (or Vista… ugh) its the same as having a normal PC box, in that all your computers resources are dedicated to running JUST XP[/quote]Yeah, I already knew that much about virtualization. I understand the memory requirements and all that stuff. I was just wondering if CS2 had any real big bugs with VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop. I also wanted to run Microsoft Office if it was possible. I know I’m going to buy Fusion or Desktop, I was just wondering which one I should get and if I should bother trying to install CS2 or just give up.
Max the RAM on the MBP; 4GB is not overkill for a development/graphics system.
This is IMO, more important the CPU clock frequency. [COLOR=“Blue”]OWC[/COLOR] is a great place to get high quality Mac memory at reasonable prices.
I agree about the Applecare; always buy it with any system that includes a display.
^ I was going to get more from Crucial when I needed it. @snickel, 4 gigs seems I bit much right now. I’m not sure if I want to spend that much anyway. If the price on RAM goes down, will an MBP support an upgrade above 4 gigs, say 6 or 8 gigs total? :q:
Not quite related…but I once ran Photoshop in VMware Sever on my Ubuntu install on my laptop… It actually worked pretty well…but I just ended up installing it on my Vista partition and deleted my VMware version. You do really notice a difference, in terms of performance though.
