Trying To Decide Between The MacBook Pros

Hey everyone, I'm looking for some advice on which MacBook I should buy. I've never used a Mac before, but my brother is a huge Mac fan and said I should definitely get a MacBook Pro. I'm going to college to major in media design, so he thinks the Air isn't going to quite match my needs. I have a budget of ~$2000, so with the student discount the baseline Retina Display is an option. I've tried it out at the Apple Store, along with the 13-inch and 15-inch regular Pros. Out of all of them I liked the Retina Display the best. I just really like the screen and the way it looks and runs. It was a lot faster than the others, but I'm assuming that has more to do with the SSD than anything else. However, I've heard people talking about various issues with the Retina Display version and that's sort of making me nervous about buying one. I have an external hard drive that I keep my music, movies, and pictures on so if at some point in time I need to send it in to be repaired or replaced that's fine by me. I'm just not really sure how that whole process would work, because I've heard some people say that Apple is quite reasonable about defective parts and replaces them quickly (or at least with minimal fuss) and I've heard others say that it's next to impossible to get them to honor the warranty. I know that the regular Pros are easier to work on, so I'm not sure if that should affect my decision. Mainly I just want a laptop that's fast (no problems there compared to the dinosaur I used currently), good for media, and will be fairly future-proof for at least 4 years. I'm fairly sure I'm going to buy the Retina Display, since I think it fits that pretty well, but I just wanted to ask if anyone had any thoughts on this, since I know next to nothing about Macs personally and my brother thinks any of them would work.

The decision is yours to make but keep this in mind: If you want the Retina, make sure you order it with the maximum amount of memory that you can afford as the memory is not upgradeable. The hard drive (flash drive) is proprietary but with some ingenuity, folks like Other World Computing will have a replacement before too long just as they did with the MacBook Air. But again, you'll want to order as large a drive as you can afford.

You're not looking at $2000 for a well equipped Retina.... even with a student discount (which doesn't amount to that much) you can easily go over $2500 for a Retina and that's before you add Apple care which you will definitely want to buy.

Dashie said:

I'm just not really sure how that whole process would work, because I've heard some people say that Apple is quite reasonable about defective parts and replaces them quickly (or at least with minimal fuss) and I've heard others say that it's next to impossible to get them to honor the warranty.

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If you "talk" to enough people (just like searching on the internet)...you can always finds folks that will have experiences on both sides!

The truth is...as long as the computer has warranty remaining...and as long as it's a manufacturing defect (not liquid spills or abuse by the user)...Apple is VERY good about repairing things!!!

The folks that told you that getting Apple to honor the warranty is next to impossible...aren't telling you the truth...or aren't telling you the whole truth!

- Nick

If you are off to college and have the desk space you might want to opt out for the iMac and pick up an iPad to be portable.

If I were to recommend anything at this point it would be to get whatever system you can the biggest bang for you buck and still be within your limit. When I was buying my macbookpro back in May I switched the options around to give me the most mileage for my money. Things to keep in mind - you want to extend the warranty then there will be no problems for at least three years; you also want to max out what you can if you are going retina because they are not easily upgradable atm.

If your budget is $2K then the Retina is out. It's also the first iteration of that model and while I am very confident that Apple has thought it all through, real-world testing has tendency to pick up on issues that may not have been discovered in testing.

I agree with your friend that the MBA is a little too "light" for a design major. I like the option of an iMac and an iPad, but I think a MacBook Pro (non-Retina) and a nice big second monitor back at home base might also be a compelling combination.

First thanks for the responses, I'll take into account what you guys have said. I have a bit of graduation money, enough to pay for the upgraded RAM and AppleCare on the Retina Display one. I do have an iPad currently, but space is a bit of a premium in my dorm, so I don't think the iMac would be a good choice. I don't think I'll have a problem with the 256 GB of flash memory as I would only be putting applications on it and keeping music, movies, photos, etc on an external drive. I'll definitely be taking a trip to the Apple Store sometime soon to see what they have in stock there, and if not then I'll order one online. Thanks for all the help guys

I also do not reccomend the retina display because of the things you lose by having it. a disk drive is important to load your editing software and you will need a bigger hard drive than you expect because of the file size

So, what started off as my mom calling Apple to ask some questions ended up with her wanting to place the order, so she wound up ordering the 2.6GHz Retina Display with 16 GB of RAM and 768 GB of flash storage... Which was way over the budget I thought we had, but I'm not complaining! It should arrive in 3 to 5 weeks

congrats you have a great mom, enjoy your mbp, should do the job you want and not regret it.