Best place to get a good deal on a new MacBook?
 

Thinking of getting either the MBP i7 quad core or the better retina version.

£1499 or £1799.

Are there any deals out there at the moment? I also need a VAT receipt so no "off the back of a lorry" ones :thumb:

Check apples refurbished site

I got my MBP Retina from Amazon for £1,580. It was the cheapest place I found.

Apple 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display (Intel Quad Core i7 2.3GHz, 8GB RAM, 256GB Flash Memory, HD Graphics 4000, 1GB GeForce GT 650M, OS X Lion)

I would certainly recommend the retina screen. Comparing it against my sisters older Macbook, the retina screen just looks WAY better.

Yep, I bought my daughter a i5 MacBook Pro from Amazon for her 16th,

£845 (index electronics) quick delivery,

Was a bit cheaper than the apple rrp and John Lewis

Get somebody at University buy it for you? Don"t they get about 15% off?

15" retina i7 £1699

http://store.apple.com/uk/product/FC...retina-display

See, there's a debate going on that Apple don't ask for proof of being a student/teacher if you buy off the website, is that true?

We've got a friend who's at Uni but she's just gone on holiday for a week and being the impatient type, I didn't want to wait lol

Refurbs look like a good deal though but it's for a present, so do they come boxed looking new or are they reboxed in different boxes if you know what I mean?

I wouldn't worry, just get a laptop bag and wrap that:thumb:

You certainly need to apply for the discount whilst connected to an educational network

You can confirm this yourself, by going onto the apple education site and following the process

I would imagine you need a .edu email address too

I bought my son a refurbed iPod touch from the apple store

It was as close to new as you could have hoped for initially - new box, peripherals - manuals, whoops Apple products don't need manuals


But after a year of so I changed the battery - and I think it had had a hard life to be honest, the seal around the screen was obviously damaged, not sure i would buy a refurb unit again

There is not that much difference to suffer the mental anguish of knowing it is not new

My experience was that I had to send a scanned id badge that showed I was an honorary lecturer at a University. As a result iirc I got 15% off the cost but also got the 3 year extended warranty for £50 when usually it costs approx £250.

In total that equated to a saving of circa £500, so well worth the effort.

Swap the drive out for a SSD, rather than getting the retina display model.

Amazing difference.

You don't get one included at this price!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!!!!!!

What does a £1500 Mac do that a £750 Laptop doesn't?? Genuine question!

Looks cool ;)

Doesn't depreciate like an Alfa Romeo?

I don't buy a laptop to hold it's value - surely that can't be it???

boots up from completely switched off to ready to use in 11 seconds. try getting a crap windows based OS laptop to do that, good luck! not to mention the retina screen, cool magnetic charger thingy and the awesome touchpad that you can use to swipe/zoom etc. mac OS's are far superior to windows for eg in that they dont run loads of rubbish in the background using up ram and cpu power. not only that but apples customer care is second to none, if it should go wrong then you will get it fixed or a replacement free of charge.

So for a simple web surfer such as myself - not really worth it!

To be honest, I have a windows netbook and don't really have the Apple bug but my gf just sold her 2010 macbook for good money and the depreciation thing is relevant if you want to upgrade every couple of years.

Sure she could buy a much better windows laptop for half the price, but "once you go Mac, you never go back" ;-)

Apparently!

Start up takes another 20 seconds with similar spec windows

Of course most people would be dead by then :rolleyes:

Did that come with a UK keyboard and a VAT invoice?

My MacBook is over three years old and has survived two drops onto concrete, suffering only dents.

However, I feel they are a bit too expensive and I'd like to move away from Apple's walled garden anyway.

I'll probably run Linux in the future from a budget laptop. I'm running XBMC from a Linux box as my media player so open source is my way fwd for me.

My windows based laptop takes 6-7 seconds to start from a cold boot and cost me £760
Dell xps12

My Apple laptop is 13 years old and still in full working order. Everyone I know with Windoze laptops replace every 4 years or so, so in the long term mine is cheaper :) Plus, I use Windoze and Mac OSX in my job, and would rather eat cucumber than suffer Microsoft at home :razz: You usually find Mac users are well experienced in both systems and choose Mac, whereas PC folk have hardly ever seen a Mac and are extremely verbose about the perceived negatives with little or no personal experience on which to base their opinion.

If you can wait until November there'll be a 'Black Friday' event, 10-15% off usually.

Barclaycard were recently offering 12 months 0% on Apple Store purchases paid on their card. May have ended !

IIRC, AllanB on here works for Mac Warehouse, so might be able to do a deal.

Up to 3.5% Quidco available for Apple Store purchases.

John Lewis offer a 2yr warranty, and will price match if you play their game.

Buy a Mac Mini. :)

What the fvck have cucumbers done to deserve that, unless "eat cucumber" is a euphemism for sucking c0ck, in which case I agree

Anyway, that said, when I was looking at the specs for my daughters MacBook I did remark to my wife that you could get the equivelent spec for under £400 on the wintel platform.

But heyho, it was not all about "speeds and feeds", and she really wanted a MacBook (it was, in part, a reward for working extremely hard for her GCSE's and getting into one of the best 6th form colleges in the country)

One thing has slightly annoyed me though, after days of her seemingly using it solely as a massive a music/video entertainment centre I said, "listen google Open Office for Mac", download it, install it and transfer all you work from your old PC and NAS drive - then understand how it works, you will need it next year at Colledge (and I don,t have a clue how macs work)

20 mins later she has downloaded, but along with some sh1te called Mac Tweeks, which was obviously some crap Ad/malware

I naively thought this was less of an issue on Mac's

Anyway, I take corradoboy's point that a lot of dual users choose Mac's

I am typing this on my wife's IPad, and I find them brilliant for what they do

I have been given an HP tablet with windows 8 on to evaluate and it is laughably inadequate in comparison (I am talking about the traditional use case of domestic sofa surfing, not connecting a keyboard and firing up a financial spreadsheet)

I bought it off Amazon.co.uk and it has a normal keyboard? All the letters are in the same place if that's what you mean? Lol. Not sure about a VAT reciept though.

Are you trying tell me a mac of twice the age ( and cost obviously) will keep up with windows machine half the age.??

I'd buy one tomorrow