Wife's Acer is dying slowly so I think I am going to give her mine which runs fine and get something new.

I really like the Apple design, love my iPhone and had a great Mac back in High School. All that being said, I understant that Macs are way overpriced compared to comparable PCs.

So I'm looking at the lower level 13.3 Macbook Pro. I do tons of web surfing, video browsing, emailing, watching movies, some light game play and some little things from work here or there involving Excel and Word/Works.

Thoughts?

Will be fine. 13" screen is kind of small though, you might try getting a refurbed 15"

if you can, try to get her to an Apple store to see it.

love my mbp 15"......

MBP would be for me not for her. Can you get a refurb 15 for around the price of the 13 new?

Do the refurbs have the same warranty, good reputation?

Looks like it would cost me an extra 400-500 bucks for a slightly larger screen and smaller jumps pretty much everywhere. As long as I'm fine with the screen I really can't see any of these other improvements warranting all that extra money though considering what I use it for? Or no?

i went from MBP15 to MBP13 and love it. great size/weight and fits in the tumi bag I had for my m1210.

only problem is the res is only 1280x800, which is pretty awful when I'm used to 30"+2x20"

Yea, I don't multi table at all and when I watch movies on my laptops its like 2 feet away so I don't think it will be an issue.

Also, which Macbook Pro has the HD screen? The 15" and up ones have Intel HD, so I'm assuming that means them?

Ended up getting the 13" at Best Buy for $999 thanks to a price match of Micro Center. Pretty pumped.

it is beyond me why people pay $1000 for technology from 2005 (in new clothes) just because of that little glowing Apple logo

Well, the chasis is really sturdy imo and, if OSX is your thang (not to mention all the battery life), it isn't amazingly bad. Mostly I agree though. If you really want OSX, you must go Mac though, but if Windows/Linux would work for you, Apple laptops/computers are probably your worst choice.

Truth be told, my wife puts a pretty big premium on battery-life and size and durability, so the Apple is still a big option for her next computer (particularly since the department she is studying in at university indicate that they prefer their students to work off of Macs). Additionally, the 27" iMac offers pretty good value given its ridiculous screen, so that is on the table for a next computer as well, though I would definitely be bootcamping Windows 7.

I don't need insane specs. I want something that will last, run well, look good and not give me any problems. I had no problem paying a little extra for this, I've skimped on computers for the past 10 years.

Mobile core2duo wasn't in laptops till 2007, and you are even saying that like a 2.4 or 2.6ghz core2duo laptop isn't fast enough for a 13" laptop.

Seriously I was a diehard PC only guy for a long time and have had my share of PC laptops. My 13" mbp is my favorite laptop that I've owned, and displaced what I thought would reign forever, my dell XPS M1210.

I can't give up windows, and OSX is not the one OS to rule them all, but the 13" mbp is a solid laptop.

I doubt I could justify the cost of hte 15 or 17" models

+1 on the 13" MBP. Picked one up this past weekend at a Micro Center. My first Mac and Absolutely love it and not going back to windows at this point.

The specs might be slightly slower but the much better build quality(and looks), battery life and how OSX works better and smoother than Windows is worth a little extra than a computer that is going to fall apart on me and get viruses and not run smoothly. On top of that the battery not going loner than 2 hours within 6 months to a year.

The new MacBook Air looks very interesting:



http://www.macrumors.com/2010/10/26/...o-counterpart/

http://www.apple.com/macbookair/

I picked up the baby 13" Air and really like it, just blown away by the thinness of it. Putting Office 2011 on tomorrow, we'll see how it runs.

Have been reading a TON of great stuff about this laptop. Honestly, since the 11" ones start at the same price as the Macbooks and preform pretty well when compared against them or even the entry-level Macbook pros, they seem a strong candidate for a new notebook. If only I weren't considerably more entranced by the Alienware m11x (not by the looks, by the specs).

One thing is holding me back from buying the new MBA, not being able to upgrade ram to more than 2GB.

kerowo please please pretty please let us know if you put boot camp on this thing and see how it performs for poker with HEM/PT3 running.

After the fact, true (it's soldered in), but at time of purchase you can upgrade any of the airs to 4GB for an incremental $100.

Serious question: what are you doing with all your Macs?

If I'm counting along right, you got an iMac, an iPad, an iPhone, a MB Air, and a MBP. And those are just the ones where I know OTOH that you got em--I suspect there is more...

My 3yr old MBP has 4gb ram in it. It's almost 2011, I want at minimum, "max 8gb"

Sorry, I don't really play poker that much anymore and I'm too old to play it on a 13" screen.

The iMac is my main machine, it has a Drobo hanging off of it for storage for everything else. The Air is going to be used at work for note taking in meetings and mobile skyping in of a remote worker. Unplugging the extra monitor and crap from the MBP at work was a pain and always messed up my desktop. I was using the iPad for notes but the terminal app I was using was a pita on a small screen and typing on the iPad isn't great enough to want to do much of. The iPad is for email and web browsing and playing Tower Defense on the couch and movies while flying. The MBP is going up on Craigslist once I get it cleaned up. With the iPad in the house it was being used primarily to pay bills on the dining room table instead of back in my office. Oh, and there is the new Apple TV which has the improved interface into Netflix that makes it browsable. That and I have an older HP Pavilion that I bought when Vista came out that runs 7 now for when I need a Windows machine. Pretty standard really...

Consider posting your thoughts on the Air once you've played with it. A friend of mine contemplates getting one to use it for (digital DJ) gigs.

look at this stuff, isn't it neat? Wouldn't you say my collection's complete?

up until recently I had

iMac
iPad
iPhone
MBP 15"
MBP 13"

I sold the 15" and iMac... i feel naked

This is my first glossy screen laptop and so far I haven't had any issues with it. The screen is very nice, nice enough that I haven't had to increase the font size so I can read text on it (don't ever get old). We'll see how fast Office runs on it today. So far I'm very happy with it.