God killed my macs. Replacement questions...

Okay, so lightening hit my house and fried a couple macs, among other things.
We've got homeowners insurance to cover the stuff, so it's all good.

I'm looking at the Mac Book Pro's to replace the tower and mini.
I do graphic arts for a living. I use pretty much the entire Adobe Creative Suite regularly, and am hoping to be able to do some work on the Mac, but not alot. I guess the most frequent duties the mac will serve are Hulu, Lightroom and Photoshop. I take alot of photos...

I've got a budget of roughly $3200, and am debating the value of the Solid State Drives versus non, and 8 gigs of ram versus 4 etc. I find myself leaning towards a solid state drive and 4 gigs of ram...am I nuts or is this good...

Also, it's $1000 to do 8 gigs of ram instead of 4. What am I missing here? I haven't bought in a long time, but that sounds ridiculously high to me. Can I buy 3rd party and install myself for cheaper?

Any and all thoughts are welcome.
Thanks!
-Ted

8GB of RAM is going to cost you around 700-800 dollars form a third party vendor. It's slightly cheaper, but not by much.

I seriously doubt you even need 8 gigs of RAM to begin with. Not unless you plan on doing some serious 3D renderings or heavy music encoding.

SSD is not worth the money. Use that money to get a larger external HDD, and upgrade the HDD to a larger size. IE 500GB 7200 RPM HDD.

Don't get ram from Apple, way overpriced.

A lot cheaper to just get your system with the base ram the stock config give you and buy third-party ram yourself from Corsair, OWC, Kingston, etc.

zeroskillz said:

Also, it's $1000 to do 8 gigs of ram instead of 4. What am I missing here? I haven't bought in a long time, but that sounds ridiculously high to me. Can I buy 3rd party and install myself for cheaper?

Any and all thoughts are welcome.
Thanks!
-Ted

Click to expand...

Don't purchase memory from Apple!!! Buy from someone like Find the latest Performance Upgrades, Firewire and USB Hard Drives, SATA, Memory, Laptop Battery, and more at OWC, and install it yourself.

- Nick