“Perfectly rational decision process, what surprises me is how civil the reactions are — Mac/PC tends to be a religious divide for a lot of people.”

Those are the people who need to step away from the computer and go outside every now and then.

Nice one James. As a recent convert to Macs myself I’ve got to say I’ve not regretted my purchase, although expensive for me, for one minute. It’s a complete replacement for my ancient windows comp. and if it wasn’t for my need for the TabletPC I would be hard pressed to go back to a Windows system. I dunno Mac OSX just seems to flow so much better and like a couple of posters have said – it just works

Perfectly rational decision process, what surprises me is how civil the reactions are — Mac/PC tends to be a religious divide for a lot of people.

Let us know how things work out; I know people who are thrilled with Parallels (haven’t tried it myself) and I’ve had mixed experiences with XP and bootcamp.

-avi

Welcome to the fun side of computing.

Well, I guess sooner or later we at GottaBeMobile.com are gonna all say we “GottaMac”, and I am gonna have to take a bite of the Apple (my lips tremble at the thought though). I have to admit to not having much experience in the last few years on Macs, but have been most hesitant to jump back into the “orchard”. There is only so much time in a day to learn and use a computer, and part of my hesitancy is that once I enter the orchard, my time gazing through the “Windows” will be challenged. What’s a geek to do?

The one consistent thing I keep hearing though, is the audio/video production issue. If you knew how much time we spend at GottaBeMobile getting videos produced, you would understand the lure. It is a great feature of our site, but takes so much time. If a MacBook would help that, then I am all for it.

Be interesting to see how well Mobile Tech Manor fares with video, etc. now. I assume the Mac has a lighting enhancement feature? Past history proves you may need that one James!

My problem is that I tend to carry both my Samsung Q1 and my MacBook Amateur (aka not Pro) back and forth from home to office because I enjoy using both! Maybe, I need that Modbook. Hmmm…

Congrats James on your new Macbook Pro. I got my Macbook Pro in November and use it as a desktop replacement; I use my Samsung Q1P daily for work but the Mac works great. I have been doing videos of movies, pictures on DVD’s and the whole works with no problems so far. Also if you have a WiFi “N” it’s much faster for over the air video and audio. You guys can also use iChat with the built in video camera and works great. I also recommend you get some external hard drives for your video. Am running Mac OS X, Windows XP Pro, Vista Business Edition, using bootcamp and Parallels works great and you’ll find out that your 160GB hard drive will be less then you expected.

Yeah baby!

The only issue here is that Apple may update the 17 at NAB.

I went through the same thing recently and replaced my Dell desktop with an HP dv9000t notebook. I currently dual booting with Vista and Ubuntu. It supports two 7200rpm sata drives and 2G ram.

Fully loaded with the Nvidia 512MB graphics card and an HD-DVD would set you about 3k. 400 less if you forgo the HD-DVD (which I regret that I spent money on that)

Ah James, seems the Apple pixie dust fairy has been pretty busy at JKonTheRun! I agree with some of the other posters who talked about value. I have always agreed with you though, the “P” in “PC” for personal computers is just that – personal.

Nothing against Apple, having used them extensively at work for the last four years (and our IT folks did a pretty good job of keeping us up to date with each new hardware/software, release/update).

It didn’t make me a convert, much to the chagrin of some of my co-workers. (Macs still crash, still have hardware /software conflicts, still break down just like any computer.)

And, as I watched new folks in the office run up their credit card debt at Apple.com with each Mac Book Pro purchase (some for nothing more extensive than checking e-mails and synching iPods), I smiled as I happily paid as much as HALF to a THIRD LESS for a similarly or (more often) better equipped desktop, laptop and finally a tablet.

Do I like the looks of Apple? Can’t deny it, they are absolutely lovely to look at. But I found I really liked the look of green staying in my wallet a whole lot more

Congrats. You won’t regret going Mac for video production. It’s so much easier to use and just works.

The Mac has Firewire 800 built in. You can keep large video files on a similar HD, editing them in real time. This is definitely a Pro feature.

Interestingly, I was able to configure a 17″ HP laptop(1680 x 1050), Vista Ultimate x64, 320 GB HD, HD-DVD Drive & DVD+/-R DL burner, 2 GB RAM, Core 2 Duo T7200, 512 MB GeForce Go 7600, 802.11 A/B/G wireless + bluetooth, HP media remote, built-in webcam with light, free shipping, 2 year warranty = USD$2,779.98! Throw in some rebates and you could be looking at under $2,500 for the same specs.

But we know JK just wanted to play with a mac and keep the familiarity of Windows nearby.

It’s a shame the Toshiba Tecra M7 was discontinued before you had a chance to consider it as a desktop replacement. My Toshiba R25 is pretty similar but less powerful and it processes my web videos just fine. In fact, with the Core 2 Duo processor, I can set the video to process on one core and continue working normally on lighter stuff, like blogging and web surfing. Unless you plan on stepping up to DVD-quality videos, the M7 had more than enough muscle and without sacrificing pen input. Of course, I think its screen was only 14″, but personally I’d prefer a smaller integrated screen and use a larger external monitor at the desk (I’d have pulled the trigger on a widescreen LCD already, but we’re shopping for new living space).

Anyway, there’s certainly nothing wrong with a MacBook Pro (except the lack of pen input). Should serve your needs very well, and you’re quite right about it being competitively priced. Just looking at components, it appears higher priced than the other guys, but one must also consider design and the subtle features, like running Intel’s replacement for BIOS. And I’m assuming it has draft-N wifi and a Firewire port, both great options for data transfer. Should work out quite well for you.

The link is http://www.htguys.com/

Thanks,

Joshua A. Hall

You can configure a 17″ Dell laptop to the same specs as the Mac Book Pro for about $500 less. Add in a 25% off coupon that Dell continually runs and the savings go down even more.

Did I mention that the graphics card would be a Nvidia Go 7900GS instead of the relatively underpowered X1600. Oh yeah, and you can even flash the 7900GS to the 7900GTX firmware and realize 3DMark2005 scores of over 8000.

One Caveat though, if you use the M1705 as the base system you can only configure the CPU up to 2.13GHz. This shouldn’t be a huge dealbreaker though because we all know that the processor speed isn’t the limiting factor on computer performance.

The MBP is a nice purchase. But for my money the Dell offers a whole lot more for a whole lot less.