<p>Admittedly, the support I got for my iPod wasn’t that great. But, the support I’ve gotten for my iBook and MacBook have been FANTASTIC. Apple have gone above and beyond when I had issues.</p>
<p>The craziness I’ve heard about PC problems was enough to keep me away. I have family and friends with PCs, and they always have problems with overheating, having trouble reading CDs/burning CDs, the speakers/sound messing up, and keys coming off of the laptop keyboards. I’ve never run into anything like that with any Mac I’ve ever used.</p>
<p>I think Macs are well worth the extra money, and if you buy wisely you can get student discounts. I found I paid almost as less as my brother did for his PC by buying on a tax-free weekend and using student discounts.</p>
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<p>Slashdot is a news site, not a forum. While you may not want to hear possible downfalls of apple, they certainly are there. No matter how much you want to try and mentally secure your purchase. Lets take a college student for instance who has a paper do in 2 days during finals week. Public computers are hard to come by during this time, and you certainly wouldn’t want to sit there for 10 hours writing a paper 2 days in a row. You hadn’t planned on going to the library and suddenly 2 days before you paper is due your laptop just turns off and doesn’t boot anymore. Now lets assume you have owned your laptop for 7 months. </p>
<p>Scenario A, you have a Mac and take it into the apple store. The problems turns out to be a faulty motherboard or logic board as apple like to term it. The genius at the apple store tells you it will need to be sent into the depot for repair and it will take about 1 week. You thought it would be fixed on the spot, but they at the apple store only fix very minor things like memory and hard drives. You are now forced to buy another laptop or go to the library, if you were lucky enough to backup you data. </p>
<p>Secerio B, you had a Lenovo thinkpad and you call Lenovo in Atlanta. You explain the situation and they either have a tech at your door the next day ready to replace the motherboard between 9am and 5pm,you send it in for overnight depot repair or you exchange it for another one. All 3 options get you back the laptop in 1 day rather than ~ 7 days. </p>
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<p>Though Macs overheating are actually fairly common.</p>
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[QUOTE=Dr. Horse]
Scenario A, you have a Mac and take it into the apple store. The problems turns out to be a faulty motherboard or logic board as apple like to term it. The genius at the apple store tells you it will need to be sent into the depot for repair and it will take about 1 week. You thought it would be fixed on the spot, but they at the apple store only fix very minor things like memory and hard drives. You are now forced to buy another laptop or go to the library, if you were lucky enough to backup you data.
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<p>I guess it differs from place to place. Apple Singapore are not allowed to keep your computer more than 3 business days.</p>
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<p>It posts news articles but provides and encourages active discussions
about the news posts. I just checked the first page of /. and there were
thousands of discussion posts on the articles there.</p>
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<p>If it isn’t the disk, just ask them to get the file off the disk for
you. Note that this is far easier to do with current generations of
MacBook Pros than it is with earlier versions.</p>
<p>My kids have MacBook Pros and they are very good about backing up
their systems to our private webhost. One could just setup Time
Machine too. We have 8 laptops for three people so I could just give
them my MacBook Pro or I could just buy another one as a second spare.
We have five other Windows laptops that they could use too.</p>
<p>The service at the Apple Store provides diagnostic services that most
people don’t want to do. They’re also done without having to relay
things to try over the phone which is frequently a very inefficient
way to diagnose problems.</p>
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<p>You can generally get free training at Apple Stores for Apple products
via seminars. You can also get help with software issues or just go in
to ask them how to do something.</p>
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<p>Blame nVidia for this one. It’s an industry-wide problem.</p>
<p>Question on Lenovo: if you have to have it repaired more than twice
under warranty, do they just give you a new one?</p>
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<p>Thats fine, but you still don’t have the computer. If you follow the scenario it is still a inconvenience. Also not everyone else can afford a new laptop on the spot or have 5 spares lying around. While you may have a elaborate backup plan, few do and few have the means to have 5 laptop redundancy and a web host for backup. </p>
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<p>Well that’s nice, still doesn’t get the laptop fixed any faster. </p>
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<p>It may be the fault of nvidia, but apple still chose to use their component. If apple is selling a product they are responsible for it and responsible for the parts that make up the product. If your cars axle were to one day fall off you would look to sue the car manufacturer, not the small firm which made the axle.</p>
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<p>I dont think it is a written policy. Though I have seen them give new laptops on the first go before.</p>
<p>Computers are critical for work and college students. We have spares
in the office - they’re just older computers that we haven’t tossed.
I think that college students should have a realistic backup plan and
a realistic spares plan or access to a machine that can get the job
done. College could easily provide a backup server with enough space
for a semester’s work.</p>
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<p>Yes, but it’s something that’s factored into the hardware price.</p>
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<p>This isn’t strictly true. nVidia took a large charge and is covering
half the costs for all of the motherboard replacements. nVidia is
acknowledging their responsibility and paying for their mistakes.
Adding to the problem is that nVidia won’t identify the parts that are
faulty. Basically you get a new part and hope that it wasn’t one of
the bad ones.</p>
<p>I’m a PC girl personally, but Macs are great! I’m just not as used to them, and I don’t need Photoshop or any other art editing software which works 10x better on Macs, so I don’t see why I would spend $400+ more on my computer by getting a Mac.</p>
<p>I’m trying to upgrade to Vista x64 SP2. You download a 1/2 GB file and then run it. On my system, it thinks for a while and then says that it can’t install it.</p>
<p>It tells me that I need to download and run a diagnostic tool that will tell me why it can’t install SP2 on my system. The diagnostic tools is 98.3 MB. That’s bigger than the entire Open Office installation.</p>
<p>I find it interesting how everyone assumes that the PC debate is a Mac vs. Lenovo debate. Lenovo’s are generally more expensive than a comparably equipped HP or Dell. Not everyone that owns a PC owns a Lenovo…</p>
<p>I wasn’t able to get Vista SP2 to install, even with the repair tool. I guess that I’ll wait until Microsoft comes out with a better update process. I really don’t want to reformat and reinstall on this machine.</p>
<p>I have one question: I have a <1 year-old MacBook 13" (the all-white kind). Do you think its a bit too heavy for college? I don’t know how often i’m gonna have to carry it around though, but i’m kinda dreading that :(</p>
<p>Are the new MacBook/MacBook Pro a lot lighter than the old version? I’m considering trading my old one in for a new one but i’m not sure if i should get another MacBook or just go with the MacBook Pro and use it for a long time.</p>
<p>Really appreciate it if anyone can give me an opinion! :)</p>
<p>There are lighter models out there compared to the MacBook and MacBook Pro line. Apple’s offering is the MacBook Air which makes design compromises to achieve its form-factor. The MacBook Pro 17 inch is light for its class but you can find lighter laptops. My Dell XPS M1330 is in the four pound range which is lighter than the MacBook.</p>
<p>a macbook is fine to carry around on campus. there are days i carry my macbook with me all the day and it’s ok. in terms of the difference between the old and the new macbooks, i’d say it’s not worth to exchange them for the weight since the difference is minimal. i’m really jealous of the new 13" macbook pro though!</p>
<p>I know this thread is about dispelling myths about the Mac; however, my side conversation about Macs in research labs took an interesting turn yesterday. My D, who is doing biomedical research this summer at a top university, said that all the grad students and postdocs use their own MacBook Pros (not the lab’s – they bring in their own machines every day) to record and crunch data. They program using MatLab. Not a single one of them is using a Windows PC. </p>
<p>I used to recommend that people in the sciences and in business get a PC, while others might be more happy with a Mac. Now I’ve decided that, at least for biology, having a Mac may be a big plus. Of course, it depends on the university and the individual lab, something that students cannot know before they arrive on campus.</p>
<p>Please see <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-computers/731167-case-apples.html#post1062749987[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-computers/731167-case-apples.html#post1062749987</a> and help me out! Thanks!</p>
<p>I need some help with terminology.</p>
<p>For a laptop insurance, what does $60 Annual Premium for $88 deductible for a premium of $3500 mean?</p>
<p>My son has to set up an Apache Server web site at his summer job and he’s noodling around trying to figure out how to do it on Linux. I went into my MacBook Pro and set up a web server with four mouse clicks. That was pretty amazing. He wasn’t surprised - Apple has done a good job at making some complicated things simple to do.</p>
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Fixed that for you ;)</p>
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[QUOTE=BCEagle91]
My son has to set up an Apache Server web site at his summer job and he’s noodling around trying to figure out how to do it on Linux. I went into my MacBook Pro and set up a web server with four mouse clicks. That was pretty amazing. He wasn’t surprised - Apple has done a good job at making some complicated things simple to do.
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I had to set up Apache at my summer job, and doing it on a Mac was a total pain. Apple has patched Apache to hell and back and changed all the default settings and locations of the config files. When I first set it up on Tiger 3 years ago, the files were in one place. When I went back last year and had to use Leopard, I found out that they’d decided to change all the config file locations and defaults.</p>
<p>Trying to control it from the command line is a pain, as Apple has obfuscated everything behind it’s frustratingly oversimplified GUI. It also uses Apple’s wonderful in-house launchd init system, which has the infuriating property of starting processes in a seemingly random order, such that a set of Macs with the exact same hardware and software configuration that are booted at the same time will have different PIDs for the same processes.</p>
<p>On Linux, OTOH, you can be sure that the package maintainers won’t have messed with the software until it’s entirely unrecognizable. You can follow directions on how to set it up without having to worry about which OS version you’re using.</p>
<p>Finally this year, I’ve been able to completely abandon Apple’s infuriating hardware and software and use just Linux. I do still have to test compatibility on OS X every now and then, which painfully reminds me of the sheer idiocy that is Apple, but at least it’s brief.</p>