New MacBook Pro - any experience?

[takethebounce]

So I am in the market to replace my PC notebook. Its just over 3 years old and only now am I finding some limitations with it.

Mostly on using it to editing video footage, gopro, camera, and so on and its gets used for internet, word, spreadsheets etc. I've used Adobe Premier for a few years now, it sometimes crashes and I think its because the cpu could never really keep up.

My notebook at the time wasn't cheap, 3gb ram, 1.85ghz duocore. blahblahblah. I am not fully geek certified so I am looking for people who have experience with the newer Pro's. I was into bestbuy and they had two, those same two are also available through the apple store but the apple store isn't near my house.

I read through the Mac thread, it offers some good info, but I have also read that the newer Pro's aren't much better than PC based notebooks. I know I would have to invest into a few new programs like my video editor and office programs, but much of my other software is Mac compatable.

The model I am looking at is the 2.2ghz with the 500gb HD and i believe 4gb ram and runs about $1850. I have a 1 tb Seagate that I need to see if it is compatable with a Mac, so I am not worried about HD space. The other thye have is a little fast 2.4ghz, larger harddrive, maybe little more video memory for about $2250.

Is the higher priced model superior to the lower priced one? Also I don't want to invest $2000 into something that isn't what I need. I mostly don't know what I should be looking for when looking at Mac's.

thanks

 

[sirkdev]

Go to the apple store they will get you the right machine for your needs. Very helpful, go on to apple site book an appt. at a store near you and you have a personal rep dedicated to you for as long as you need. This is what sold me on apples. Another thing is look on apple's site for refurbished equipment, full warranty at a discounted price.

PS In my opinion my Macbook is 10x the computer as my last PC.

 

[HRT Offroad]

Go to the apple store they will get you the right machine for your needs. Very helpful, go on to apple site book an appt. at a store near you and you have a personal rep dedicated to you for as long as you need. This is what sold me on apples. Another thing is look on apple's site for refurbished equipment, full warranty at a discounted price.

PS In my opinion my Macbook is 10x the computer as my last PC.

X2...100% If you are gonna buy a mac...get it from the apple store...the staff is much more knowledgable and helpful than at places like Best Buy. They will tell you and sell you what you need, and nothing more. I've been using a Macbook Pro for 3 years now and would never entertain the thought of going back to a PC.

 

[4mcntrls]

Go to the apple store they will get you the right machine for your needs. Very helpful, go on to apple site book an appt. at a store near you and you have a personal rep dedicated to you for as long as you need. This is what sold me on apples. Another thing is look on apple's site for refurbished equipment, full warranty at a discounted price.

PS In my opinion my Macbook is 10x the computer as my last PC.

I agree the Mac is a better machine than the pc. For a first time Mac purchase the apple store will get you lined up with what you need and then make sure to check out the refurbished ones to save a few bucks.

 

[sirkdev]

I bought mine as a refurbished, they delivered to house, booked appt and apple did all the set up and everything showed me the ropes. Done deal no looking back.

 

[Puba]

x3 go to the apple store and tell the associate what you want / looking for / going to do with it and they'll show you some options. Not painful at all.

Once you go Mac you won't go back...........

 

[takethebounce]

So I did some reading the past few days on minimum requirements on ram, video cards and cpu's and educated myself as much as I could without becomming the ultimate mac geek.

I went to the Apple store this morning and spent a little while talking with one some of thier associates. (that place is a madhouse btw) anyhow, I tell him what I am trying to achieve and he says oh I deffinetly will want to upgrade the ram to the max (8gb) on the higher end model and that the high res screen is what I might prefer over the standard. Hmm, yeah okay so turns into $2500 pretty quick without any add on support/warranty and software like Office or the High res screen. He even suggested I get the CPU upgrade from 2.4 to 2.5ghz for $250.

Initally I looked at the 15" but then I really liked the idea of the 13" but it uses an intergrated video card (just like my current pc notebook) They had no refurbs's meeting my needs either.

On the way home I said why not pop into BestBuy and see what sort of info I get there. The guy working the Apple section (best buy has dedicated apple person in house trained by apple) actuall sells me down on a model. Says sure if I want to get FinalCut Pro ($300) I would want the better video card but I could run the HD gopro footage and edit it no problem on the lower end 13". In the end I still would want the better video card for future upgrades for something like FinalCut but says I can still get the base model as it will be 3 times the unit of my PC.

He explained how the quad core works when there is demands on the video ram vs other ram. He even took the time to do a side by side comparisson on a hd video rendering and they completed the process in the same time. Explained how the screen auto dims, how the swipe pads works and so on.

So for anyone who would knock going to BestBuy I would say I actually walked out of there feeling better about buying a Mac than the Apple store.

I do believe I have made up my mind on the model though. thanks!

 

[Lococoin]

I have the base model 13" 2011 MacBook pro and it's fine for editing hd video. I use iMovie right now and haven't done much yet. Don't waste your time paying for apples upgraded ram, buy the 4 gig and upgrade yourself later. Much cheaper. I'm at 4 gigs right now and it's good but im also still using snow leopard.

Also if you can wait, rumour has it a new style will be out soon. I'd guess around march give or take.

 

[09FordFx4]

New ones in may to coincide with the new ivy bridge processors from intel.

If you can wait that long, wait.

I'm gonna wait. When comparing Mac to PC there's one important thing you need to keep in mind when looking at the specs of the machines.

Mac OS x uses a lot less resources that windows OS's. Which leaves you more RAM, CPU etc to do other things.

Think of it like horsepower to weight I a car.

If a dodge has 450HP, and weighs 3000 lbs, and a ford has 420HP but only weighs 2500 lbs, the ford will be faster.

If that makes sense.

 

[EMANAARON]

Buy the Mac you will thank yourself later.

For the first month you'll be cussin and hating it. But after you get an understanding of how they work you will never want to go back. If I was you I would wait a month or 2 as the 2012 MacBook Pros will be coming out and will be more powerful same price.

 

[Marley]

Been using Mac since 1988. Still have everyone of them (12 in all) and they all still work. I have had one problem in 24 years that required taking the machine in to get fixed. I don't think you can go wrong buying one.

I would say that you don't need the high end model and 4GB is plenty for RAM. The only part that takes long with video is the rendering. If you add a lot of effects like fade in/fade out between clips etc then the machine has to do the work of taking all the bits of information (video, audio, titles, effects) and rendering a movie out of them. The last time I did any iMovie stuff was on a Mac that was several years old with 2 GB of RAM and it was fine - only a few minutes to render it all. If you want to do video and audio editing at the same time you are doing other stuff on the computer (major multitasking) it can work in the background but will slow down to some degree.

Best Buy used to suck when it came to the Mac as the sales guys worked the whole section and generally knew PC's better and pushed customers that way. Much better there now with properly trained guys.

I do have one Dell PC just to run some $6000 software program that I needed for work. I did not have a good experience with it although tech support for the software was good the platform and operating system had a lot of little bugs - nothing major but just small irritating stuff. I stopped using it and went and made some pretty generic Mac software do the job for me.

So I did some reading the past few days on minimum requirements on ram, video cards and cpu's and educated myself as much as I could without becomming the ultimate mac geek.

I went to the Apple store this morning and spent a little while talking with one some of thier associates. (that place is a madhouse btw) anyhow, I tell him what I am trying to achieve and he says oh I deffinetly will want to upgrade the ram to the max (8gb) on the higher end model and that the high res screen is what I might prefer over the standard. Hmm, yeah okay so turns into $2500 pretty quick without any add on support/warranty and software like Office or the High res screen. He even suggested I get the CPU upgrade from 2.4 to 2.5ghz for $250.

Initally I looked at the 15" but then I really liked the idea of the 13" but it uses an intergrated video card (just like my current pc notebook) They had no refurbs's meeting my needs either.

On the way home I said why not pop into BestBuy and see what sort of info I get there. The guy working the Apple section (best buy has dedicated apple person in house trained by apple) actuall sells me down on a model. Says sure if I want to get FinalCut Pro ($300) I would want the better video card but I could run the HD gopro footage and edit it no problem on the lower end 13". In the end I still would want the better video card for future upgrades for something like FinalCut but says I can still get the base model as it will be 3 times the unit of my PC.

He explained how the quad core works when there is demands on the video ram vs other ram. He even took the time to do a side by side comparisson on a hd video rendering and they completed the process in the same time. Explained how the screen auto dims, how the swipe pads works and so on.

So for anyone who would knock going to BestBuy I would say I actually walked out of there feeling better about buying a Mac than the Apple store.

I do believe I have made up my mind on the model though. thanks!

 

[ferniesnow]

Dan, if you are going to seriously get into video you gotta go big! I have 8gb and I am getting messages about iMovie being full. My computer is only 2 winters old! I didn't upgrade to Lion as I heard that some features for iMovie were not as good as Leopard (I don't think one has a choice now tho'). I also heard that Final Cut Pro is not all that much better than iMovie (at least not worth the extra $300). I haven't found anyone that can tell me for sure tho' at least not anyone doing quality videos.

Buy the $100 One-on-One for the first year at least. That is the best feature in the world. Take your computer into the Apple store and work on things right there under guidance of the Apple geeks. I book a 2 hour personal session and then a 1 hour One-on-One (so 3 hours in total) and come away having learned a lot.

I doo like the peace of mind of no anti-virus software running and needing up-dating all the time. I started with Apple back in '82 then switched to PC for 25+ years and finally went back and it was the best computer decision I've made in years. HeeHaw!

 

[09FordFx4]

Buy the cheap 4 Gb RAM model, and get the Kingston 8gb upgrade on amazon for $50.

Way cheaper.

 

[Marley]

Buy the cheap 4 Gb RAM model, and get the Kingston 8gb upgrade on amazon for $50.

Way cheaper.

First Mac had 2MB of RAM and a 20MB hard drive. Used it for accounting for 10 years. Worked great until year end and then it would take half a day to get the report ready and print it. Seriously half a day. Knew an architect that had a Mac and at the time he had 80MB of RAM - I'm thinking that is crazy - but he needed it for the graphics!

 

[09FordFx4]

Haha yeah, it's crazy how things have progressed.

 

[takethebounce]

Dan, if you are going to seriously get into video you gotta go big! I have 8gb and I am getting messages about iMovie being full. My computer is only 2 winters old! I didn't upgrade to Lion as I heard that some features for iMovie were not as good as Leopard (I don't think one has a choice now tho'). I also heard that Final Cut Pro is not all that much better than iMovie (at least not worth the extra $300). I haven't found anyone that can tell me for sure tho' at least not anyone doing quality videos.

Buy the $100 One-on-One for the first year at least. That is the best feature in the world. Take your computer into the Apple store and work on things right there under guidance of the Apple geeks. I book a 2 hour personal session and then a 1 hour One-on-One (so 3 hours in total) and come away having learned a lot.

I doo like the peace of mind of no anti-virus software running and needing up-dating all the time. I started with Apple back in '82 then switched to PC for 25+ years and finally went back and it was the best computer decision I've made in years. HeeHaw!

I had a chance to demo the FinalCut, it works very well and is easy to navigate. It is an upgrade over iMovie, but of course, likely has more features than I will ever use.

Chances are I am going to wait until the spring now to upgrade. I'll see what the new models entail and if its nothing that is going to benefit me I might be able to score a current model at a discounted price.

I am not sure I could sit down for an hour with an Apple geek, typically I end up having a blank stare after 5 minutes haha

 

[09FordFx4]

I've got the latest final cut, it's definitely better than iMovie. Much better.

8GB of RAM is what I'd recommend for a good experience with it. However 4 would probably suffice. I have 2 currently and it was a tad slow.

 

[ferniesnow]

I've got the latest final cut, it's definitely better than iMovie. Much better.

8GB of RAM is what I'd recommend for a good experience with it. However 4 would probably suffice. I have 2 currently and it was a tad slow.

Doe that final Cut need Lion?

 

[09FordFx4]

Doe that final Cut need Lion?

Dunno if it needs it, but I am running lion

 

[gcastillo]

I have the latest MacBook Pro which is the late 2011 variant and it is great. It comes with the Lion apart from the older one which comes shipped with the SNL. I have to say that it really is powerful even with stock specs but we could always use that extra upgrade in RAM so I had mine switched to a 8GB premium. And though the SSD is as enticing as ever, I am not quite sure I am ready to shell out that much for it.