120 GB HD or 160 GB HD? (Looking to buy a White MacBook)

I am hopefully getting a White MacBook (2.0 GHz, C2D processor), and I was wondering whether the 120 GB model would be better for me, or the more expansive 160 GB model would suit me better. I have read the advice that they have for you when you are looking at which specification is better for you, depending on what you use. I am having trouble determining whether the 120 GB HD is better for me or the 160 GB, because I will have a number of text documents, will browse the internet, and use iTunes a lot. I will also have a lot of photos and maybe even try to use the video features a few times. I do not have thousands of songs or photos, as I may have about 200. Should I play it safely and buy the 160 GB model for extra space? Or will 120 be enough space for my media and still have a lot of space left on my hard drive? If anyone has either one and can describe what they use their MacBook for, please share so it will help me (and others) out.
Windows XP

I notice that you have windoz xp in your message. Are you planning on installing Boot Camp? If so you need at least 10g for windoz, and you may want more. Just keep that in mind (even if you alloc 32g to windoz, you'll still have 80g for OSX)
Also, if you're already thinking of "I can remove the applications I don't want to add more space, right?", then I would suggest getting the 160g and not worring about it (Also, you could just as easily add a larger drive later). FWIW, I went with the 160g

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I'm looking to buy a new Macbook Pro, and have questions about the Applecare extended warranty?

I'm looking to buy a new Macbook Pro, and have questions about the Applecare extended warranty? I want to know if the 3 year extended warranty covers what damage. Like water damage, accidental damage, lost or stolen macbook, manufactory defects, or any other kind of damage, maybe be even cosmetic damage. Can anyone help me?

If you are talking about features of the MBP itself, as long as you are not looking at the Retina models, then the memory you can upgrade yourself for a lot less than Apple charges, and that does not affect the warranty as Apple considers memory a user permitted upgrade. Great sources are Crucial and OWC, both are Mac specialists and have on-line videos on how to do the install.
If the 15" is what you are looking at, a good upgrade is the 7200 rpm hard drive, gives a little better performance over the standard 5400 rpm drive.
The Hi Res screen is good if you do a lot of graphics work.
Comparing the 13" amd 15" you will notice the 15" has a second, discrete graphic processor...helps when you get into heavy duty videos, games, graphics...but keep in mind that kicking in the second processor uses a lot of power and will run the battery down faster.
If you are looking at the Retina models, then keep in mind there are no post-purchase upgrade options...you have to buy with everything you want at the start.
Just some thoughts.

Looking to buy my first MacBook Pro, advice needed

Hey all, this is my first post. I am looking to become a MacBook Pro owner for the first time. I have an iphone5 and an ipad but have decided it's time to step up. I have decided to give my ipad to my wife because she likes the more portable device and just uses it for web browsing and Facebook.
I am looking for opinions, I am currently leaning towards getting the 13" macbook with retina display. I will be using it mainly for Internet browsing. Downloading music and films. Managing them and using iTunes etc. will also be looking to stream what I download to my ps3 if that is possible. I am not a massive user in terms of I do not video editing or music editing professionally but like the idea of iPhoto and iMovie just for playing around and seeing what I can do. Could turn into a new hobby for me.
I had a windows laptop previously and it became riddled in viruses and slowed down so quickly so will not be getting one of those again. In terms of MacBooks do they generally stand the test of time? It will not be slowing down on me anytime soon will it?
My main concern is the storage. I feel my best bet is the 256gb hard drive and an external hard drive also.
Is there anything I need to consider other than what I have mentioned above before buying one having never used a mac before? Does the App Store work the same as on the iphone? Are there any really good apps to get me started?
All advice welcomed. Thanks

Depending on your intended use, you may want to max out the RAM to 16GB. This will future proof your Mac to some extent.
Althouigh your MacBookPro won't slow down over time, OSX RAM requirements may increase with future updates.
I agree a good backup plan is essential. Time Machine for incremental backups and a cloning strategy with an offisite rotation is ideal.
You may want to consider storing Music/Video on your network, either a NAS device or USB drive attached to a router. A future purchase could be a MacMini as a Server.
As for applications, the usual office apps are available in Mac versions (MS Office being the one that comes to mind). I would start with the Apple programs and then, if you need others, come back here or search the web for reviews.
Lastly, consider whether you need to run Windows either in Bootcamp (dual boot configuration) or as a virtual machine. For example, you may have Windows software that is not available on the Mac.
Good luck and enjoy your new Mac.
Sam.

Looking to buy a refurbished MacBook Pro for video editing. Need suggestions on what to look for.

Hey Everyone,
I already own a 2012 Mac Pro Desktop. I do some pretty advanced video editing on it, using FCPX and After Effects, with FXFactory and many other plugins.
I need to invest in a MacBook Pro so I can transfer my projects and edit at different locations.
I'm looking for a refurbished or used model to save some money where I can.
My budget is not too large, but I can probably manage $1,000 - $1,500
Can anyone suggest a good model (im guessing 2011-2012) and a good graphics card to look for, so it can handle this type of stuff. I will obviously max out my RAM also.
Thank you so much for all the suggestions in advance!!

Hey BobRzand OGELTHORPE
Thanks for your reply! BobRzJust looking to clarify.. When you said "Also, that's typically not on the 13" models but is on the 15" (or the 17..." were you referring to the onboard graphics memory? Should I stay away from a 13 inch? I'm going to follow OGELTHORP''sadvice and go for the 2011 model. The 13 inch are the most affordable and I've found ones with a 2.8GHz Processor that is right in my price range. Thanks again for your help guys!

I am looking to buy a new macbook. I am not sure whether to go for the Air, 13inch Retina or 15inch Retina.

I mainly use my current laptop for browsing the internet on my sofa, however I also want to be able to use photoshop and logic without a struggle.
My thinking so far is, MBA 13inch is portable and fast with good battery. rMBP 13 is more powerful but still portable. rMBP 15 has better graphics performance than the 13ich and might be worth the extra and sacrifice some portability.
Thoughts?
Thanks.

If you're going to start using Photoshop, you'll get much better performance from the 15" rMBP's discrete video card. I wish that I had gone for the full 1GB card on my 15" non-Retina because, sometimes, the 512GB discrete card just isn't powerful enough. If you're looking at portability, then I'm assuming that you wouldn't even consider the non-Retina 15"? I would rule the Air out entirely, so you're left, in my opinion, on the differences between the 13" and the 15" rMBP - and in performance, the 15" rMBP just can't be matched by the 13" model.
You may get some differences of opinion here - were it me, I'd go for a non-Retina 15" since you can still add your own RAM and a SSD to it. That being said, it's nowhere near as portable as the 15" rMBP.
Good luck with your journey...
Clinton

Looking at buying a used macbook

i have the chance to buy a macbook and would like to know before I hand over the money how can i tell if it was stolen?, I want to know as i dont want any surpise visitors, and what should i ask the person etc etc?

I can think of no certain way to know if a computer has been stolen or not. You can contact the local police in the locality of the seller and ask if that serial number has been reported as stolen, if you can get the serial from the seller, but that's not going to be definite proof since the unit could have been stolen in a different city or even country. I would suggest that at minimum you ask the seller to provide a copy of the purchase receipt, but even one of those could be faked.
My advice is that if you can't trust the seller not to be selling stolen goods, don't buy the computer. Perhaps you could find a reputable dealer, either locally or on line, that deals in used computers that would have a MacBook in your price range.
Regards.

I'm looking at buying a white iPhone 4S.

I also want the white/purple iPhone 4 otterbox defender series case. Is this possible even with the sharpie trick without the headache of tech issues?

I personally own an iMac, a black macbook, and a windows Dell PC. I have used windows my entire life (20 years) and I bought my macbook in May of '06. I had quite a few problems with the Dell, including viruses, spyware, and the hardware was crap. I called their tech support and I spoke to (no offense) someone over seas who barely spoke english and i couldnt understand them and they could barely understand me, not to mention the 2 hour hold before i got to talk to a real person. What few problems i have had with my macs, I called, got through very easily, and talked to someone based out of California that easily understood me. If you are on more of a budget, if you are a student or know someone that is, you get 100 off of the macbooks, plus the apple care protection plan WHICH I RECOMMEND!!!!!!!!! Plus if you are attached to windows, you can put it on your mac using bootcamp or a program called parallels.
If you do decide to purchase any apple product, purchase the Applecare Protection Plan with it. It may seem expensive, but if anything goes wrong with your computer, they fix it no questions asked.
I had a bad battery, took it to the apple store, and they took it out and gave me a new one. That paid for the applecare itself.

I'm looking at buying my first macbook pro and not sure which one to get

i want to compose music, not professionally just for home use, and i dont know if its worth saving the extra £300 on the the i7 8gb and going for the i5 4gb.
as its my first ever macbook i need advice please.

ok sorry this should go in macbook pro page sorry

Looking to buy a MP Retina - A few questions!?

Hi, first time I have posted on here, looking to buy a 15" Macbook pro with retina display, 16gb ram and 2.6 ghz. I know a bit about laptops but not in depth so a few of these questions might seem a bit stupid.
1. On my current laptop when I watch Videos online, HD or standard, the fan gets loud and it heats up alot making the video choppy so I need to pause it and wait until it cools down a bit. Does the same apply to a laptop of this spec or will it run the videos much better without getting too loud and warm?
2. I also play Football Manager 13, again on my current laptop, the fan gets loud and makes the game run slow can I expect the pro to run it very well and fairly easily while doing other things, like being on skype and just general browing?
3. How good is the graphics card in the pro, I am not looking for anything amazing as I know macs arent known for the gaming experiance just something that can run a few games on a reasonable level.
4. Are apples office applications any good compared to MS office, mainly numbers and pages?
5. Does the Retina display make videos look worse that are not optimized for it, or do videos just look the same and HD videos will look better?
6. Lastly, in terms of futureproofing can i expect this laptop to last at least 4 years in terms of being powerful enough to accomodate future software programs such as autocad and other programs?
Thanks

Hello, and welcome.
1. That just sounds like an overheating CPU (doens't mean it's a bad CPU necessarily), most likely (very) old laptop. This kind of stuff will not happen even on a $400 laptop (windows) being sold nowadays. It definitely won't get loud because playing HD vids is not a taxing task for the CPU/RAM/Video Card in the retina MacBook Pro.
2. You will not have a problem running FM13 + the OS + skype + multi-tab browsers, at the same time. Generally, when you want to have multiple things going on at the same time, your computer gets slow because of two reasons: your hard drive cannot retrieve the data you request fast enough, and the computer has used up all of its RAM resources and is trying to dump non-critical RAM content to your hard drive which in turn gets back to the first problem I mentioned.
3. The video card that's in the 15" retina MBP is NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M. It has a 3DMark score of 2190 - definitely not a gamer rig. Here's a comprehensive list of games this laptop's video adapter can handle: http://community.futuremark.com/hardware/gpu/NVIDIA+GeForce+GT+650M/games
4. Office applications are comparable to that of Microsoft's, if you stick to simple stuff (for example, writing math equations in Pages is the biggest headache). However, there's a steep learning curve due to the multi-pane interface Apple employs. Esentially, you have a different layout, different shortcuts, different effects in Keynote. There's also Office for mac which is probably the silliest solution Microsoft has come up with: an office Suite that doesn't share the same features with its windows counterpart. If you save a file in Word on the Mac and then open it up in Windows most of the stuff is in the right place - but quite a bit of your layout and formatting gets messed up. Heck, even on Windows, if you format a document in Word 2013 and open it up in Word 2007 it will be different. So, don't have great expectations of being compatible with your windows buddies, it's going to be a pain most of the time.
5. I have no idea, I did not play with a retina display enough. Logically speaking though, I would expect the vidoes to be much more enlarged when you full screen on that display as opposed to a 1080p one. HD videos will also be up-scaled, but not quite as much. So overall, I expect video to look a little less than crisp (not in the sense of being able to notice individual pixels...) on the retina display. But go ahead and test it out on a mac at the apple store - fire up a youtube video.
6. This is probably Apple's first step towards alienating people who know the least bit about hardware. I refuse to buy a retina MacBook Pro because I can't even upgrade my RAM. Everything is soldered onto the logic board, which means that in 1 year from the point when you buy your mac, if the RAM fails, they'll replace the whole logic board/mother board rather than the relatively cheap RAM stick. And worse of all, you'll have to pay the premium for that, since your warranty will have expired. So if you're looking at upgrading RAM/HDD in this machine down the road, I'm afraid you're out of luck. This machine will be obsolete in a year or so (Apple releases updates to their MacBook Pro lines every year or so), and in 2 years expect to be left out of some features. For example, 2010 MacBook Pro owners cannot use AirPlay mirroring with their shiny new Apple TV in 2012.
And here's some extra information for you to consider: You're paying a really high premium for hardware that's not worth that much. Just as a reference point, I put 16GB of RAM in my 2011 MBP for $120. If I were to upgrade from Apple, I would have paid $200 for 2x4GB (because Apple does not officially say that the laptop works with 16GB of RAM).
If you're looking to game some, just get a serious Alienware gaming laptop or an MSI one for way less and way more powerful, and more future-proof than the retina MBP. For example, most of those gaming laptops come with 2 HDD bays which allow you to RAID 2 SSDs (that translates into mind-blowingly fast boot ups, game loading screens will be a thing of the past).
In my opinion, there's only 2 advantages of owning a MBP over any other comparable laptop:
1. Looks (it's very well crafted) and battery life (well designed power saving features, more than battery capacity)
2. OS X-only software like Final Cut Pro, Coda...

Looking to buy new MacBook Pro for editing with Premiere/After Effects, but wondering about trade-off between Processor Speed and Graphics Card

I'm a professional video editor (using Premiere and After Effects) looking to buy a new MacBook Pro and am deciding between two models. The slightly older model has a 2.8GHZ i7 (3rd generation) Quad Core processor with a 1GB SDRAM of NVIDIA GE FORCE GT 650M Graphics Card. Then newer model has a 2.3GHZ i7 (4th generation) Quad Core preocessor with 2GB SDRAM of NVIDIA GE FORCE 750M/Intel Iris Pro Graphics Card.
Which makes the most difference (processor speed vs. graphics card) with editing with Premiere and After Effects?
Any help/guidance would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
mike

Poikkeus wrote:
1. Your MBP will be somewhat slower than your iMac, as reflected in the general speed; desktop Macs have more RAM and storage.
You recon? If he get's the 17", he would have up to 8x more RAM, 4 x more GPU,, and a bit faster CPU;.
2. Be aware of the advantages and disadvantages of extra RAM. Loading up the slot will make juggling multiple applications easier, like Photoshop, VLC, and Safari. However, more than 4gigs of RAM will make loading your MBP on startup twice as slow - at least a minute, probably longer. That's why a MBP user with extra RAM should sleep their machine nearly always when not in use, rather than powering off.
I did not know this, I just upgraded from 4gb to 8gb the other day. Have not noticed it being slower, but I don't often shut it down. It's nice to not even have to bother with ifreemem.
3. Additional storage and RAM will maximize the basic capabilities of your MBP, but you won't be able to make a 2.3ghz machine any faster than it already is.
SSD
4. I still feel that your iMac will be faster than your prospective MBP. The only way to dramatically increase the speed would be the installation of a SSD drive (like the lauded OWC series). But they're not cheap.
I don't want to rain on your parade, but want you to get a more realistic idea of your performance.
I chose a macbook pro, 17" of cause. I use it for gaming. Yes a iMac is better for gaming. But, it's nice to be able to move around. Set up a man cave in the lounge 1 week, or in the bedroom, the next. But you fork out a lot more dosh for that luxury. And yes, not as much power as Poikkeus has said.

Looking to buy MacBook Pro: Processor Speeds

I am looking to buy a 15" MacBook Pro with 4GB Memory and a 200GB HD, but don't know whether its worth £200 more to get .2 Ghz more processor speed with the 2.4Ghz model, opposed to the 2.2Ghz model. I have never owned a Mac before, will it make much difference? Thanks. Tom. x

Is a new OS likely to be a tad unstable?
Likely, no. Unlike Windows Vista this is not a major overhaul and rebuild but a progression of software releases. For stability this is a huge advantage for Apple and more importantly, us users. But as with all major software releases there will be issues of one type or other which range from cosmetic, to marginally annoying and then to very serious which can be crippling.
While I don't expect very many major issues, if any, it's not a given, even with Apple, as some will attest to with even minor updates.
Ultimately the "risk" is dependent on how mission critical your system is. Personally, I never upgrade to a new OS, which even includes minor updates, until I see what issues are going around and with what applications. Only then will I be happy to make the move. The .2 updater is the magic one for me which usually comes a few months later. Plenty of time to prepare my transition, to ensure all of my software is fully comaptible and to choose carefully when it suit me best.
Everyone's different and see "risk" different so do what makes you happy.

When I try to open a Pages document from iCloud, created on my iPad, I get message stating I need a newer version of Pages. When I go to app store all I get is "installed" when looking at pages app. my Macbook pro is up to date with all updates.

When I try to open a Pages document from iCloud, created on my iPad, I get message stating I need a newer version of Pages. When I go to app store all I get is "installed" when looking at pages app. my Macbook pro is up to date with all updates. Any ideas?

You have 2 versions of Pages on your Mac.
Pages 5 is in your Applications folder.
Pages '09/'08 is in your Applications/iWork folder.
You are alternately opening the wrong versions.
Pages '09/'08 can not open Pages 5 files and you will get the warning that you need a newer version.
Pages 5/5.01 can not open Pages 5.1 files and you will get the warning that you need a newer version.
Pages 5.1 sometimes can not open its own files and you will get the warning that you need a newer version.
Pages 5 can open Pages '09 files but may damage/alter them. It can not open Pages '08 files at all.
Once opened and saved in Pages 5 the Pages '09 files can not be opened in Pages '09.
Anything that is saved to iCloud is also converted to Pages 5 files.
All Pages files no matter what version and incompatibility have the same extension .pages.
Pages 5 files are now only compatible with themselves on a very restricted set of hardware, software and Operating Systems and will not transfer correctly on any other server software than iCloud.
Apple has not only managed to confuse all its users, but also itself.
Note: Apple has removed over 100 features from Pages 5 and added many bugs:
http://www.freeforum101.com/iworktipsntrick/viewforum.php?f=22&sid=3527487677f0c 6fa05b6297cd00f8eb9&mforum=iworktipsntrick
Archive/trash Pages 5, after exporting all Pages 5 files to Pages '09 or Word .docx, and rate/review it in the App Store, then get back to work.
Peter

After some advice, I am new to Apple and looking to purchase either the MacBook Air 13inch with 256GB and 8GB mem or the MacBook Pro 13inch with retina 256Gb and 8GB mem. I am an assistant principal in a primary school and also studying my masters

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It's not likely that you'll get 12 hours in reql life. Those benchmarks are set under very strict controlled conditions. Kind of like mileage per gallon claims on cars. If 16GB of ram is an option at all I'd highly recommend you get that. As far as storage 256GB isn't alot, consider storing some things on an external thunderbolt real

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Go to Settings>General>Accessibility and turn of either Invert Colors (iOS 6) or or White on Black (earlier iOSs).

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http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3939

120 GB HD or 160 GB HD? (Looking to buy a White MacBook)

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