Laptop buying advice forum: Just a question or 2 about Mac Laptops?

The most I will do is offer when I feel people should consider the Mac as an option. I have been using a few OS's for the past few years, including various iterations of Windows, OS X, and LINUX. The truth is, none of them do everything well, they each have strengths, weaknesses, and other.

One reason to go with the Mac is that the hardware and OS vendor are the same, so there is tighter systems integration at the factory level than there are in Windows machines. I won't comment as to whether or not this leads to an inherently "more stable" machine, as I would prefer to back that up with metrics, which is too far a dumpster for a forum response. What I will say is that you have one-stop shopping for support. You call Apple.

I will also say that the single HW/SW vendor does not mean that a Mac never crashes or locks up. All computers running all operating systems crash or lock up irrecoverably.

Of the users who come to me for advice that I do recommend looking at a Mac, they fall into a few categories:

1. young couples starting families or needing a computer just after the birth of a child who are not that computer savvy. I feel ("feel" means that it is just my opinion) that the Mac OS places functions like image archive management and distribution, video editing and distro, and other such things that people like to do for baby's first steps, right at their fingertips with large numbers of templates for varied looks. While some of us who are computer geeks will claim that we can do the same thing on a WindowsPC, we don't see the computer from within the same paradigm as these types of users, and so some of us cannot make the leap to seeing that for some people, a Mac is the right fit.

2. creative professionals who need to create without spending a lot of time or money. A lot of the tools that come with the Mac are sufficient enough for lower-level professionals (and maybe even some higher ones who do not want the cost or time of buying and learning more complex tools).

I do not recommend Macs to people who just need to do email and surf the web. Without a high need for handling lots and lots of self-created multi-media, there is no need for the expense of a Mac. A Mac makes sense when it keeps you from buying additional software or saves you the time of scouring the web for free stuff that will take a non-savvy computer user tons of time figuring out how to use to get desired effects.

There are a few other instances in which a Mac makes sense. For me, I wanted a platform that I could use creatively, but also boot into a Windows OS and game in the lightest and thinnest gaming-capable hardware package available in that form-factor. For me, in February 2008, that was a MacBook Pro (also note that my Windows OS alternative at the time was Vista).

Hope this helps.
- Vr/Z..>>