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Contrary to popular belief, I am not a computer guy. Sure, I consider myself to have a basic competence with the things. On the hardware side, I have semi-built my own desktops; on the software side, I can program passably in Fortran 77, C++, Perl, and an assortment of other minor languages. Really, though, I just learn what I need to do whatever task is required of me in any given moment. I have known some true computer people -- they spend their weekends writing device drivers, just for fun!
What experience I have has been mainly within a Linux environment. I have been using Linux since about 1994 and administering Linux systems for over a decade. Although I avoid Windows whenever possible, I have certainly had my fair share of experience there, too. With Macs, not so much.
Anyway, I have two computer related questions to throw out to the collected wisdom of my gentle readership. One involves Mac hardware; the other, Windows software. One hundred points are at stake for each question -- the person with the best answer in each category walks away with them!
So, without further ado, here goes:
Question the First: What is the difference between a MacBook and a MacBook Pro. Online searches have mainly turned up two answers, neither of which is helpful. The first is simply a common statement that: "A MacBook Pro is essentially the same as a MacBook, but more powerful." Thank you, Igor. Not terribly useful; this answer screams ignorance. The other unhelpful answer is that a MacBook has a thirteen inch screen, where MacBook Pro screens start at fifteen inches. Whilst once true, this information is now obsolete. I am curious because I recently priced a MacBook and a similarly equipped MacBook Pro. With the former, I took the base system from Apple's website and simply upgraded to a 320 GB hard drive and added a three year warranty. With the latter, I configured it to the same specifications as the MacBook -- same RAM, same hard drive, same processor speed. The MacBook Pro still cost $245 more. What I want to know is this: What does one actually get for those $245? The best I can tell, you get:
Question the Second: I run a dual-boot system with Linux and Windows. Annoyingly enough, my Windows partition seems to have recently been infected with some minor, yet annoying, viruses. Adware, Google redirects -- you get the idea. I have been running various free anti-virus programs: Spybot Search & Destroy, Ad-Aware, AVG Free, and Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware. This has had varying degrees of success, purging the worst of the lot from my system. Not all of it, though. So, gentle readers, do you have a favourite free program to recommend? Or perhaps it is time to byte the bullet and purchase some digital protection? If so, what would you suggest that has been useful to you?
Remember! There are two hundred points at stake here! Think carefully and answer well!
What experience I have has been mainly within a Linux environment. I have been using Linux since about 1994 and administering Linux systems for over a decade. Although I avoid Windows whenever possible, I have certainly had my fair share of experience there, too. With Macs, not so much.
Anyway, I have two computer related questions to throw out to the collected wisdom of my gentle readership. One involves Mac hardware; the other, Windows software. One hundred points are at stake for each question -- the person with the best answer in each category walks away with them!
So, without further ado, here goes:
Question the First: What is the difference between a MacBook and a MacBook Pro. Online searches have mainly turned up two answers, neither of which is helpful. The first is simply a common statement that: "A MacBook Pro is essentially the same as a MacBook, but more powerful." Thank you, Igor. Not terribly useful; this answer screams ignorance. The other unhelpful answer is that a MacBook has a thirteen inch screen, where MacBook Pro screens start at fifteen inches. Whilst once true, this information is now obsolete. I am curious because I recently priced a MacBook and a similarly equipped MacBook Pro. With the former, I took the base system from Apple's website and simply upgraded to a 320 GB hard drive and added a three year warranty. With the latter, I configured it to the same specifications as the MacBook -- same RAM, same hard drive, same processor speed. The MacBook Pro still cost $245 more. What I want to know is this: What does one actually get for those $245? The best I can tell, you get:
- A backlit keyboard
- A firewire port
- An SD card reader
- A spiffy looking metal exterior
Question the Second: I run a dual-boot system with Linux and Windows. Annoyingly enough, my Windows partition seems to have recently been infected with some minor, yet annoying, viruses. Adware, Google redirects -- you get the idea. I have been running various free anti-virus programs: Spybot Search & Destroy, Ad-Aware, AVG Free, and Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware. This has had varying degrees of success, purging the worst of the lot from my system. Not all of it, though. So, gentle readers, do you have a favourite free program to recommend? Or perhaps it is time to byte the bullet and purchase some digital protection? If so, what would you suggest that has been useful to you?
Remember! There are two hundred points at stake here! Think carefully and answer well!
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Other than that I've been very happy with it :-)
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And I was going to recommend Avast! also.
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MacBook v. MacBook Pro
MacBook Pro is Apple's line of, for lack of a better word, "professional-grade" laptops.
MacBooks are generally less expensive and less powerful than MacBook Pros. However, since (a) both lines have a wide, overlapping, range of configurations and pricing, and (b) Moore's Law pretty much ensures that both lines get more powerful quickly, it's easy to have a MacBook that's more powerful than a MacBook Pro, even of the same vintage.
Where the real differentiation is is in small things, like backlit keyboard, firewire port, SD card reader, and metal exterior. Also: The machines likely have different motherboards, so that the MacBook might not be able to take the same maximum amount of memory, or have the same battery lifetime, or whatever. If you look at two machines configured within their range of overlap, the difference in max memory, processor, etc, isn't going to be an issue.
The peanut gallery here is also saying that the screen quality and video card is usually much better in the Pro, and a large cry of "Don't discount the value of the backlit keyboard."
If you have the option to visit an Apple Store, I'm sure you'd be able to try them out side by side and see of the backlit keyboard and/or video card makes a difference for you.
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Re: MacBook v. MacBook Pro
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Re: MacBook v. MacBook Pro
I will say that, for the two machines that I configured, the MacBook and the MacBook Pro had the same battery lifetime (seven hours) and video card (NVIDIA GeForce 9400M). However, you are right that, in addition to the four difference I mentioned, there is also the issue of maximum RAM expandability and I cannot speak to the relative screen qualities right now. The lovely
So, at the moment, I can see five differences (firewire, backlit keyboard, SD card reader, exterior, maximum RAM) and two potential differences (screen quality, speaker quality). For the moment, the MacBook is leading for me. I don't care about firewire or an SD card reader... and am unlikely to use the maximum RAM. Much as I do like a backlit keyboard and a nifty aluminum exterior, that doesn't seem worth $245 to me.
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Re: MacBook v. MacBook Pro
the key dif in the past was that the pro had "pro" connections and I think it had an IPS display. The principle pro connection was pc express ports. I would expect that a mid cycle upgrade would include a bunch of upgrades
the key upgrade is likely to be a switch to the 6 core gulftown processor series that will be plug compatible with the 4 core i7 series that appearing in laptops. Otherwise it will be 4 core I7 mac book pro's. Other changes will likely to be interfaces such as USB 3.0 which is starting to appear on windows laptops or Firewire S3200.
With USB 3.0 the lack of PC express slots becomes unimportant as its USB is no longer the bottleneck but the devices at each end. The other possibility is that the firewire will be upgraded to the S3200 standard to compete with USB3. However since USB3 is an Intel standard and comes free with the Intel chips that Mac uses
so if you have a mac book pro with a 6 or 4 core processor, a USB3/firewire S3200 interface and an LED IPS display you have a pro macbook that will draw a new round of upgrades from the mac fan boys.
meantime the macbook could have 2 or 4 cores, USB 2/firewire S800 or 1600 and a LED TN display, at a much lower price point.
If you don't know about IPS displays, they basically give I think about 10 bits per colour vs the 6 to 8 bits of TN displays. Apple switched to TN as it was LED backed is that it gave better battery life, and since the LED could be switched off the TN was much more like IPS. Now their is LED backed IPS, and complaints about lack of pixel depth, a switch back to IPS seems obvious.
Obviously most of this conjecture, but it's based on what is being released right now
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I have an older (2 years now) macbook. It seems the new macbooks are more formidible on the inside (better video cards, etc) than they used to be. The macbook pro can be upgraded to twice the ram. Other than that....you're mostly paying for the spiffiness. That's about it. Try messing with them both in an Apple Store, see if they feel different enough to warrant the price difference.
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Thanks for the advice. I'm beginning to think that the list of features I mentioned above -- plus the "spiffiness factor" that you cite -- are pretty much all that the extra money buys. That and the maximum RAM expandability. I checked
Hmmmm... I suppose that I had better go back to paying attention to the meeting. The next talk -- on OD analysis -- is about to begin.
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I can't see you on the video anymore, so I don't get to watch you commenting. :-(
P.S. If you manage to post a comment here during your presentation, I will be enormously impressed!
[*] Mainly because of very low statistics.
[**] Though it will likely become his thesis either way, which makes it useful to him.
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[*] It's magic!
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As for your talk? I'll admit that I didn't pay as much attention as I would have liked. I'm actually quite interested in what you are doing... but it is well past midnight here and my ability to focus has dropped considerably.
At some point, I wouldn't mind chatting with you about your work with POLfit at a time that is not ridiculously late. Tis interesting stuff!
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In the US Apple gives big discounts to academia. In the UK Apple gives small discounts of the UK price. For the UK price take the US price plus sales Tax. Remove dollar sign, add sterling sign, then add 17.5% sales tax.
Typically for UK residents its much cheaper to buy retail in the states, then remove all packaging, bags etc, change keyboard to UK standard and void the warranty. When the pound was at over 2 dollars the cost of the flight made little difference to the saving,
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That brings up an interesting question about academics... My understanding is that the traditional standard for a PhD is significantly increasing the breadth of human knowledge (or similar). Can one get a PhD based on a dissertation for an experiment which didn't turn out the way you'd hoped? E.g., could your dissertation's abstract be something like "Theoretical work by Bromstead suggested that under conditions X the standard model predicts result Y, while many other competing theories predict result not-Y. After 3 years of experimental design, building, and data collection and analysis, detailed herein, we conclude that under conditions X, Y happens to within 5sd. Therefore, the standard model is vindicated once again, and new physics is avoided for another day."
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On DZero, which
dawn of timemid-1990s, the joke is that you don't get your PhD until you have made sure that there is no new physics in your analysis... or: "Congratulations, you have confirmed the standard model! Now you can have a PhD!"From:
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I love Spybot in the background (so teatimer not so much). We have a mutual friend scalp-hairless friend who will no doubt have some significant opinions on the matter (he, in fact, recommended Spybot but will no doubt have more tools in his toolbox than that... Probably a bootdisk with anti-spyware/anti-virus stuff. Some of these new viruses force the OS to not recognize its been infected, so booting from a disk helps...)
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new unreleased core i7 mac book pro benchmarks
http://www.macrumors.com/2010/02/06/unreleased-core-i7-macbook-pro-61-benchmarked-supplies-constrained/