Littleted

so im windows guy, always have been.
I had a new fancy retina mac bought for me to run som tests, thanks to guys who responded to my domain questions.

So heres my views

Upgraded to mountain Lion, was painless, bit faffy but easy enough
Boot camps was easy, partition bit would scupper a few that dont know what to do, but its easy once u know.

So i now have a dual booting pro, first impressions

1. Boot time, blows any SSD ive seen, sorry guys but this pro does windows in less than 8 seconds, and Lion in 5 seconds. we the windows users suffer from the bios stuff at the start, that all motherboards have.
2, heat it gets hot when running games, the fabled wsad keys especially, something must be under that areas, fans are good though.
3 Power lead, i personally think this looks a good idea but in practice is ****, i knock it out all the time, Magnetic, needs to be stronger, or i need some trick to clicp it somewhere, but on the sofa i knock it etc.
4. Screen is to die for res in windows 7 is 2880x xxxx massive and games run smooth as hell even at that res, so VGA card is good, 70FPS in world of tanks at that res.

So in short id say the 1799 varient is just about worth it, very light powersave is great, close the lid and it always comes back online, id say pop 16 gig ram in if you can, but the 2300 version is too pricy in my book.

Overall i like it. would i buy it mmmmmm unusre probably i would if it was 1400.

boxst

I got a new MacBook Air upgraded to the higher processor and 8gb. It is quite impressive, boots Mac OS X very quickly and runs Windows either as bootcamp or in VMWare Fusion very easily. I'm quite impressed.

The Mac Retina was too expensive for my liking.

Gigsy

Mac FTW

I use both Mac and PC for work but feel like I'm using some Fisher Price toy when I switch from my MacBook Pro to my Lenovo ThinkPad - which despite being a decent spec machine, boots and runs slower than my 4 1/2 year old MacBook that I use at home.

Used to be a fully Windows bod developing ASP.Net / MS SQL until I bought a Mac Mini to test stuff on 6 years ago... thin end of the wedge to say the least, I now have 2 MacBooks, a MacBook Pro and the self-same Mac Mini still working perfectly - not to mention the iPods, iPhones, iPad, Apple TV, accessories and AirPort stuff that seems to have aggregated its way into the household.

I know a lot of people are Mac haters and I feel a bit dirty having just confessed to the Mac lust above (is it bad that I've turned jobs down because they only use PCs? ) but honestly, it might be a little pricey but the stuff just works which definitely makes it a worthwhile price to pay for me.

Tidgy

massivley over priced.

your not comparing a work lenovo (****ovo lol) vs a home mac are you gigsy?

JackClark

Here comes the hate...

Gigsy

No, the MacBook Pro and Lenovo are both work machines and one of the standard MacBooks was my work machine until 6 months ago... Hate the Lenovo (and TBF any Windows machine I have to use). Interested to try Windows 8 out though.

When I was Windows based, I'd get through a laptop every 12-18 months so given that my MacBook has lasted as a work machine for 4 years (and is still working perfectly well), personally, I'd rather spend the money on a Mac than end up having to buy 2 or 3 laptops in the same time frame.

Like I say, there are plenty of people that don't like Macs out there but in my personal experience, I can't fault them and reckon they actually work out to be pretty good value for money in the long run.

jura11

iTrader: (7)

I've before Macbook,great machine,but at the end I've sold him,because now i'm using lots of profi programs and with Boot Camp has been just pain in ****,run some programs

If I would don't use those programs I would go again with the Mac,but for now I'm happy with PC with W7 and OSX or laptop with W7 and OSX


Jura

JackClark

Gigsy, you're absolutely right, the common shout will be "overpriced" but what people don't realise is a Mac will last longer and it's resale value will be much higher than any PC. My last Macbook lasted me 5 years and then I got £500 for it, it was £1000 new.

Cue tons of I have a 7 year old PC that's as fresh as a daisy comments, none of which I will believe.

Gigsy

I have a couple of older Windows machines that still run fine despite their age........... so long as I've just put a fresh install of Windows on them

JackClark

And you shut them down a few times a day.

Gigsy

lol, some PC hate for once! ...it's like the year 2000 all over again

JackClark

Well you have to shut them down a few times a day, if you don't Windows Update will without *saving your work.

*saving is something that non Mac users have to do, old school stuff, like scheduled back ups… or no back ups.

Gigsy

What, no Time Machine?

JackClark

No time machine with Windows, terrible shame.

Gigsy

Bless.





(surprising absence of Windows bods ripping into us Mac guys - perhaps it's 6 monthly rebuild day?)

JackClark

**** will hit the fan later no doubt.

Just to stay on thread a little.. ted.. Nice machine you have there, I'm sorely tempted to upgrade my i7 Macbook, but it's running sweet and my iMac could be better as it's 7 years old.

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

I'd rather wait for a retina cinema display

No person in their right mind can criticise apple for having a too high resolution screen.

Its long overdue that the mainstream re-introduces proper high res displays again: Something I've hated since we all switched to mainstream LCDs and were bummed with 768, 1050 or 1080 line displays when the old CRTs they replaced could happily display 1600lines.

Littleted

Agree I've always been a 1900 1200 man or 1600 in the old days this new screen is awesome although now 40 I need glasses my eyes are slowly gettin bad

Tidgy

ahh fair doos, macbook don;t have the grunt for what i need at work lol

Gigsy

Am running a 2.4GHz i7 with 8GB RAM.... does me for most things. Plus it's made of aluminium and has a shiny Apple logo on the lid which clearly makes it ace

JackClark

Mine's a 2.66Ghz i7, how much more grunt can you get?

J4CKO

iTrader: (1)

I have Windows server that have been running over a year, serving thousands of users, not just one trendy in a roll neck sweater doing the odd bit of email ;D

Macs are very nice but generally they are lifestyle accessories, all the heavy lifting is done by Linux or Windows, my windows laptop gives me no aggro, neither does my Ipad.

Gigsy

You've obviously never used a Mac server then

I think if you actually used one in anger, you'd realise that they're a touch more than lifestyle accessories... I develop IPTV and VOD applications and I rely heavily on mine day in, day out. For what I need it for, a Windows machine just wouldn't cut it and whilst I could use Linux (you're aware than OSX and Linux are both Unix based, I assume?), OSX is a much nicer UX.

JackClark

The server I can believe, but are you saying that your laptop doesn't update all the bloody time annoying the **** out of you like every other Windows owner myself included.

Yesterday was a prime example, ton of security updates from Windows and one from Flash.

Gigsy

+1

I run a Windows VM to run PS3 Target Manager (Windows only software) and the bloody thing is forever updating itself (often a forced update). OSX has updates to of course but it's much less frequent or intrusive and requires a restart much less often.

BlueBugEye

iTrader: (12)

I was always a windows man, I had an iPod which was only bought under protest as I wanted the car integration.

Then I bought an iPad...... Now we have two iPad 3's an iMac and various other iPods and iPhones.

I like the fact that the Apple products 'just work' only thing I would like is a cloud service for iPhoto similar to Picassa (I tried Picassa for mac but had so many duplicate images and such a disorganised folder structure it was unusable) to store/share all images online -also uploading to photo bucket is a pain in the ***.

JackClark

iPhoto Journals for iPad are pretty good and free. I did think they'd be introduced on the desktop with Mountain Lion.

https://www.icloud.com/journals/sample/

Luminous

iTrader: (3)

I run both PC and macs, but one things if for certain, Time Machine is out. I really don't understand why people like it.

I find its terribly slow, I have about 150GB data, and criminally it does not backup the whole of your mac. It says it does, but it ignores bootcamp partitions. The disk utility is also unhelpful, as this cannot restore a bootcamp partition.

Additionally, you cannot easily alter the scheduling of your Time Machine to something that would be more useful for yourself, and it does not save to network drives unless you hack it. Saving to a network drive is an amazingly important thing, as it means the time machine can be somewhere else....ie SAFE.

JackClark

I think you're crazy for suggesting that people don't use Time Machine. It's saved people way more trouble than it gave your Windows install. At a guess I'd say you didn't back up the OSX partition from Windows. I use a network for mine, Time Capsule based.

Gigsy

Quite, I have a HDD attached to my AirPort.... seems to back up all of my Macs remotely

As it's constantly backing up (rather than a scheduled nightly backup for example), I have a lot more flexibility if I ever do need to restore anything too.

Time Machine is built into the OS and it's fire and forget software - personally, I think it's great.