Before buying a Mac

[Hussein Baghdadi]

Hey,
After a long time of thinking and sleeping I decided to buy a MacBook Pro
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15-inch: 2.53GHz
4GB Memory
NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics
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How much do you think this hardware is going to serve me well? 3 or 4 years?
And the most important question?
Is Apple going to release a new line of MacBook Pro soon?
I remember in 2007 when I bought an iPod Nano and afte two week the new Nano released, I was going to kill myself
Thanks.

[Bear Bibeault]

John Todd wrote:After a long time of thinking and sleeping I decided to buy a MacBook Pro

Congrats. That's a very nice machine.

How much do you think this hardware is going to serve me well? 3 or 4 years?

Impossible to say. It depends on what you need from a system. I have one Mac (iMac G3 Snow) that's still in service after over 7 years.

Is Apple going to release a new line of MacBook Pro soon?

Predicting Apple releases is almost an industry in itself. And why does it matter? If the machine you bought does what you need it to do, why worry about when the next one is coming out? If you are of the mindset that you always need to have the latest and greatest machine, then you will continually be behind unless you are always buying the newest designs.

I remember in 2007 when I bought an iPod Nano and afte two week the new Nano released, I was going to kill myself

Again, why? I really don't understand the "something new came out so suddenly what I've got is obsolete" mentality. Do you buy a new car every year?

[Hussein Baghdadi]

I'm going to use it for development mainly (Java, Python and maybe a little bit of Erlang and Haskell)
It is not about getting the latest thing, but what if the new release has a new feature I lack in my current release?
Any way, I hope I'm going to have it within two weeks.

[Hussein Baghdadi]

A friend of mine told me the new battery of MacBooks Pro melt the wires of the keyboard when its getting hot.
It is true?

[Ulf Dittmer]

but what if the new release has a new feature I lack in my current release?

Obviously a new model will have new features that the current model lacks. But you wouldn't have bought the current model if it lacked features that you needed, would you?

[Hussein Baghdadi]

Is it true also that the wireless mighty mouse won't work if there is any running bluetooth device (according to reviews in Apple.com) ?

[Bear Bibeault]

I've had three MacBook Pros, and my room-mate has had five without any issues.

[Andrew Monkhouse]

John Todd wrote:A friend of mine told me the new battery of MacBooks Pro melt the wires of the keyboard when its getting hot.
It is true?

Heh - if that were true, it would be front page headlines. I can still recall all the furore over the Dell batteries 2 years ago - there is no way the media wouldn't pick something like that up.

So I have a really hard time thinking that there is any truth in that rumour.

John Todd wrote:Is it true also that the wireless mighty mouse won't work if there is any running bluetooth device (according to reviews in Apple.com) ?

I'm using a wireless mighty mouse here, and there are another 3 bluetooth devices within 1 meter of my laptop. No problems there.

[Gregg Bolinger]

I actually have had issues with the wireless mighty mouse with no other bt devices running. I'm going to investigate a bit longer but basically it just stops working, even though osx thinks it is still connected. And if I turn it off, osx even tells me it was disconnected. But I turn it back on and I have to remove it and resync. If it keeps this up, I'm just going to get the USB version.

[Bert Bates]

I'll chime in with my favorite bot o' advice - not strictly Mac related, but possibly useful at pre-purchase time...

The single biggest productivity boost I've found is more pixels. Macs make it very easy to do 'extended desktop' so that an external monitor becomes an extension of, rather than a copy of the pixels on your main screen. So I'd strongly recommend an extra monitor on your desktop.

Now, I do some bouts of extensive travel so several years back I decided to try a 17" MacBook Pro - at first 17" seemed huge, but I found a fantastic Brenthaven backpack for it, and now it doesn't seem big at all, and I always appreciate those extra pixels.

hth,

Bert

[Jesper de Jong]

John Todd wrote:Is Apple going to release a new line of MacBook Pro soon?

It's impossible to know, but Apple just updated their entire line of laptops in June. I think it's unlikely that they're going to update them again so soon.

I bought a 15", 2.66 GHz MacBook Pro (with 9400M and 9600M graphics) a few weeks ago. It's a very nice machine.

Note that in September, Apple is going to release a new version of Mac OS X (version 10.6, Snow Leopard). If you buy a Mac now, you can upgrade for a reduced price. Here in the Netherlands the upgrade costs only € 8,95.

[Hussein Baghdadi]

Thanks all for your great feedback.
One more question,
What is the latest JDK version available to install on Leopard?

[Bear Bibeault]

http://developer.apple.com/java/

[marc weber]

John Todd wrote:Hey, After a long time of thinking and sleeping I decided to buy a MacBook Pro...

Congratulations! Before I switched to Macs, I went through a long period of "Can it _____?" "How will I _____?" "What if ____?" But a couple of weeks after switching, the only thing I wondered was what I had been worried about.

The only thing I can think of mentioning is the new OS (Snow Leopard) is due in September, so you might want to check on whether you would get that as a free upgrade if you bought a new machine now -- although this will only be a $29 upgrade anyway.

[Jarred Olson]

marc weber wrote:
The only thing I can think of mentioning is the new OS (Snow Leopard) is due in September, so you might want to check on whether you would get that as a free upgrade if you bought a new machine now -- although this will only be a $29 upgrade anyway.

If you buy a mac from Apple between June (when they announced Snow Leopard) and the release of Snow Leopard you can upgrade it for $9.99 US Snow Leopard Update Program. But you're right it only costs $29 so if you can find a system cheaper on ebay, it would be cheaper to buy the system and buy the leopard upgrade when it comes out.

[Hussein Baghdadi]

I decided to go with:
MacBook Pro 15
2.66 Ghz
Two graphics cards

I'm just waiting for Snow leopard to be released later this week.

[Mark Spritzler]

John Todd wrote:I decided to go with:
MacBook Pro 15
2.66 Ghz
Two graphics cards

I'm just waiting for Snow leopard to be released later this week.

Sweet. congratulations and enjoy.

Mark