Anything you wish you had asked or knew before your purchase?

Hey guys, first post. I am going to buy a MBP 13" this weekend and am really excited. This is going to be my first mac. I have been to the mac store to mess around with the thing and asked what little questions that came to mind. I was wondering if anyone had anything that they had wished they had asked about the computer in general. Not necessarily anything that would have swayed your decision to purchase but just anything in general that you may have overlooked. I use my laptop currently 99% of the time for surfing the web and basic MS Office functions as I'm a student, if that helps. Thanks in advance!

I wish I had known how little I use the DVD drive. I would have gone with an Air rather than a MBP.
For those few times I would need a DVD drive I would either buy a stand alone drive or hook up with someone else's machine.
The portability of an Air is great if you are student...even a 13" MBP can annoy a shoulder when it is carried in a messenger bag day in, day out.

The function set up for the magic mouse on my iMac. I have been a Mac user now for about a month and if I'm honest I do not miss windows at all, infact I think windows seems slow and bulky now. anyone who says "using a Mac is hard" needs to eat more fish and plenty of it.

Trolle said:

I wish I had known how little I use the DVD drive. I would have gone with an Air rather than a MBP.
For those few times I would need a DVD drive I would either buy a stand alone drive or hook up with someone else's machine.
The portability of an Air is great if you are student...even a 13" MBP can annoy a shoulder when it is carried in a messenger bag day in, day out.

Click to expand...

I considered this as well but think I am going to stick with the MBP. I work fulltime and take classes at night so I wouldn't really be lugging it around all day all over campus.

Hi

Go for the MBA you really wont miss the DVD drive and its way more portable (even the 13" silent in operation and has to be tougher as it has no hard drive.

My school sells MS Office at a discount though for like $33 but it's on a CD. How would I install without the drive?

You can either buy a separate drive for less than $100

Or, there is a feature in the OS to share a drive if your buddy has a Mac with a drive. My wife has a MBA and if she needs to install something from a CD she just puts her machine next to mine and "borrows" my drive. No wires needed.

Apple sells nearly all, if not all, of their software over the app store now. So, it's their intention to go disc-less.

Don't fret about buying a MBA...I've used my drive in my MBP over the past 30 months probably 10 times.

nwhear said:

Hi

Go for the MBA you really wont miss the DVD drive and its way more portable (even the 13" silent in operation and has to be tougher as it has no hard drive.

Click to expand...

Trolle said:

You can either buy a separate drive for less than $100

Or, there is a feature in the OS to share a drive if your buddy has a Mac with a drive. My wife has a MBA and if she needs to install something from a CD she just puts her machine next to mine and "borrows" my drive. No wires needed.

Apple sells nearly all, if not all, of their software over the app store now. So, it's their intention to go disc-less.

Don't fret about buying a MBA...I've used my drive in my MBP over the past 30 months probably 10 times.

Click to expand...

Ok you've got me thinking now but from what I can tell on the website the "specs" on the MBP are higher for the same price. Sorry I am really not a tech savy guy but I see that numbers are higher. Processor and whatnot. Plus the 13" would cost me $100 more for less "specs". Are you saying that these things really dont matter? Please inform. The apple store employee told me that the MBP was the best bang for the buck between the two. I was all set to make my purchase tomorrow or Saturday but now you have me questioning my decision.

Also I don't have any friends with Macs but my school has several Mac desktops in the library. Could i download my MS Word CD on one of those with the method you mentioned? Thanks for all your help!

I always buy refurbished...so I get even more bang for the buck.

Check out the Apple refurbished products on their site. You get all the same things except the fancy white box from the store.

I am not super tech savy to advise about the specs. You might get a little more out of a MBP, but for your stated uses a MBA would be fine. It's all a trade off between utility and weight.

For basic usage, the MBA is fine. The newer ones are a lot faster than the first models. But, if you want the best performance possible or plan to play any real games, the MBP is the faster of the two systems in Processing and Video power.

In my case, a couple of things.

I ordered my Mac Pro with dual Radeon HD 5770's because I wanted the fastest rendering performance I could get and at the time I placed the order, the online configurator offered this as the "highest performance" configuration. It turns out that CrossfireX isn't supported by the Mac OS, only under windows/bootcamp. Although I don't have a Mac application that requires that level of performance, when buying a new computer I always try and "future proof" as much as possible by buying more than I currently need. In this case, I should have gone with a single 5870 which has much higher rendering performance. As I said though, it wasn't available via the online conigurator when I placed the order.

The second thing is I wish I'd done a little more investigation of whether drivers were available for devices I wanted to put in the machine. I have an Asus Xonar STX sound card and read a review on the web of its performance on a Mac Pro so I assumed there was a Mac driver for it. Turns out it was under bootcamp using the windows driver. Although I'm planning on configuring bootcamp, I wish there was a Mac driver for it.

So lesson learned: make sure the devices/configurations you want are supported in the operating system(s) you want to run.