MacBook or ultrabook?

[demarco]

I am writing a letter to Santa.  I'm asking for a new laptop.  I want it to be lightweight and beautiful and I want a lot of space on it to store my music, movies and photos. I am leaning toward the MacBook Pro. You can get it with an optical drive which would be a plus.  I have looked at some swanky ultrabooks that might be good enough for my purposes for less money.  I am torn on operating systems.  Our desktop has Vista which I loathe and I have not heard good things about Wndows 8.  On the other hand, I use an iPad and like that well enough but I don't know how similar the operating system on the MacBook is to the one on the iPad. I do like Microsoft Works for word processing and I do not like the iPad's  "Pages" or "Numbers." 

I am reading reviews but I'd appreciate some ehell input, which I value more highly than reviews. What should I ask for?  If you're planning on getting a new laptop any time soon, what are you getting?  If you've already gotten one recently, what do you like/not like about it? 

[amandaelizabeth]

I have a MacBook Air, which I take everywhere.  You can run windows for Mac very easily on it. 

[PastryGoddess]

I have a Macbook Pro which I love.  I had a 500GB Hard drive which I replaced with a 1TB and I upped the memory from 4GB to 8GB  I also partitioned it with Parallel, so I can run Windows 7 on it as well.  Love love love it.  The pro comes with a CD/DVD drive installed.

My Xmas gift to myself is a used 11" macbook air

[demarco]

I have a Macbook Pro which I love.  I had a 500GB Hard drive which I replaced with a 1TB and I upped the memory from 4GB to 8GB  I also partitioned it with Parallel, so I can run Windows 7 on it as well.  Love love love it.  The pro comes with a CD/DVD drive installed.

My Xmas gift to myself is a used 11" macbook air

I didn't know you could get a 1TB hard drive for it. That's awesome!

I admire the MacBook Air for its wee size but I want a bigger drive.

[Lynnv]

I can't speak to the Windows machine.  The one I have is a pretty terrible Dell that work makes me use.  And we are still using XP.  Blech.  But I would hope that something newer and not from the lowest bidder would be better.   It couldn't be much worse. 

DH has a MacBook Pro that he adores.  The OS on the MB is not really similar to the iPad OS.  We find it easy to use, but we have been a Mac house for a long time, so you should take that with a grain of salt or two. 

[jpcher]

I adore my MacBook. The OS is easy to use, might take a bit of getting used to if you've been a PC user, but I don't see any reason to have a Windows OS on the Mac (I know people do it, but I don't know why . . . any explanations out there?)

DD#1's MacBook is 6 years old and never, ever had a problem. Absolutely no viruses/system crashes. She's still using the original battery and runs all the Microsoft Word/PPT/Excel, etc. programs using the Mac OS.

However, she is finding out that her MacBook (without the Intel Processor) is antiquated. They are no longer servicing/making parts for her computer. This last upgrade to the OS will be the last one her computer will take. If anything goes wrong with it, she's looking at a really nice paper-weight.

My MacBook is 3 years old (with the Intel Processor) and hopefully will last me more than 6 years.


The only complaint that I have about Macs is that if anything ever does go wrong with them you need to take it into the specialty Mac Store and you're pretty much stuck with their pricing, etc. 

[IrishGenes]

I just converted from a 14" Lenovo ThinkPad T-61 to a 13" MacBook Air... and I absolutely *love* it!  I haven't used a Mac since high school (1990), so I was rather nervous about having to learn a lot of new things.  It has been so much easier than I thought it would be. 

The main reason I went with the MacBook Air is due to the weight.  I take it to work everyday and I didn't want something to weigh down my bag in addition to the files I carry.  I love this computer!

[Lynnv]

I adore my MacBook. The OS is easy to use, might take a bit of getting used to if you've been a PC user, but I don't see any reason to have a Windows OS on the Mac (I know people do it, but I don't know why . . . any explanations out there?)

We have Windows installed on our big machine because of software that we use that simply isn't available for the Mac.

My stained glass design program.
A calendar program DH uses to make the calendars he gives to his students.
A few other things that aren't as important, but that we like having.

And we got Parallels nearly free.  And already had Windows that we weren't using.  So that part was free too.  We would have tried harder to work around it if it wasn't a simple AND cheap solution for those few things.

[joraemi]

DH has a macbook that he loves.  Slowly but surely our whole house is becoming Macs vs PC.

[PastryGoddess]

There are some programs that will only work with PC's  or work better on PC's hence the need for partitioning.

FYI if you do upgrade your hard drive, make sure to upgrade the memory as well.  1TB is the largest hard drive available for laptops

[Virg]

If you're going to spend the money for a MacBook, then you're looking at some reasonably high-end systems.  For the same money or a bit less, you can get a well-specced PC laptop, so for the money either will do well with just about anything you'd throw at a laptop.  If you don't want to chance Windows 8 (and I don't blame you for that), Windows 7 is still available everywhere.  Keep in mind that a MacBook can run Windows in parallel with OSX (which, by the way, isn't very similar to iOS which is what the iPad runs, but it's not hard to learn so there's no reason to shy away just on the basis of the OS) so if you go with a MacBook you can get both.  I'll agree with getting as much memory as possible, since upgrading the hard drive is usually a lot easier and cheaper than memory upgrades for a lappy.

jpcher wrote:

"The OS is easy to use, might take a bit of getting used to if you've been a PC user, but I don't see any reason to have a Windows OS on the Mac (I know people do it, but I don't know why . . . any explanations out there?)"

Mostly it's because they're running an application that requires Windows, and can't do without it.  For example, I have to have Windows available on my machines because many of the applications we sell don't run on anything else and I have to support them, so if I bought a MacBook I'd have to run Parallel and install a Win partition.

Virg

[demarco]

My last post in this thread disappeared for some reason.  Anyway, I appreciate everyone's responses.  They were very helpful.  I decided to ask Santa for a MacBook Pro.

[jpcher]

I think that you will be very happy with your decision.

[PastryGoddess]

May Santa grant your every wish