Purchasing a new laptop.
The battle begins.
Friends and family all feel the need to protect me from my own unbridled spending as I prepare to invest 3500 into a new laptop for school, work and gaming. My current clunky PC is on the fritz and I intend to turn it into a server/extra computer for people at my house. and intend to use a MBP as my primary computing piece.
What it comes down do is a fight between me and my best friend about gaming and his rants and rhetoric are beginning to affect me. That as well as the possible coming release of MBP with the Santa Rosa chipset and robson, it tempts me very much away from picking up one this week. What really would kill or seal the deal is the video card/price.
first, before all my other questions - is apple care with it?
So my order was going to consist of a
MBP - 17 inch, 2gigs of ram, 100gig 7200 RPM hard drive
apple care, and an ipod all of which due to my educational organization came out to 3500.
My friend looked up other laptops and the dells didn't compare in price, literally 1000 more for a very similiar setup, perhaps a bit stronger in the graphics card department.
So I ask of those who know more then me, or could at least make a more educated guess.
Will the coming of the next generation MBP and their possibly improved video cards spike my price up well over 2500 for the laptop alone? (Through educational store)
Should I expect them to come out in the next 3 months?
Is it worth it to wait? Or for someone who plays World of Warcraft, WarCraft 3 and Medieval 2 total war going to miss out on something with this new setup?
But really the two most important questions are:
Will this new MBP cost a lot more then the current? and will the video card be upgraded? If so will the upgrade be huge? or minute?
Thanks in advance and I dig the forum, a lot of intelligent discussion and interesting opinions.
Friends and family all feel the need to protect me from my own unbridled spending as I prepare to invest 3500 into a new laptop for school, work and gaming. My current clunky PC is on the fritz and I intend to turn it into a server/extra computer for people at my house. and intend to use a MBP as my primary computing piece.
What it comes down do is a fight between me and my best friend about gaming and his rants and rhetoric are beginning to affect me. That as well as the possible coming release of MBP with the Santa Rosa chipset and robson, it tempts me very much away from picking up one this week. What really would kill or seal the deal is the video card/price.
first, before all my other questions - is apple care with it?
So my order was going to consist of a
MBP - 17 inch, 2gigs of ram, 100gig 7200 RPM hard drive
apple care, and an ipod all of which due to my educational organization came out to 3500.
My friend looked up other laptops and the dells didn't compare in price, literally 1000 more for a very similiar setup, perhaps a bit stronger in the graphics card department.
So I ask of those who know more then me, or could at least make a more educated guess.
Will the coming of the next generation MBP and their possibly improved video cards spike my price up well over 2500 for the laptop alone? (Through educational store)
Should I expect them to come out in the next 3 months?
Is it worth it to wait? Or for someone who plays World of Warcraft, WarCraft 3 and Medieval 2 total war going to miss out on something with this new setup?
But really the two most important questions are:
Will this new MBP cost a lot more then the current? and will the video card be upgraded? If so will the upgrade be huge? or minute?
Thanks in advance and I dig the forum, a lot of intelligent discussion and interesting opinions.
Comments
http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/
The Macbook Pro is due to be updated in about thirty days. I'd wait. I would wager the new macbook prices will be exactly the same. Just hold off a little longer, you'll get the new chipset, leopard installed, magnetic latch with the standard spec improvement.
For your games, they will run just fine on the current MBPs. But I'd wait!
I went to the Macrumors buying guide site and noticed that every Mac except the Macbook is a 'don't buy' because updates should be coming soon. Pretty amazing.
Regardless of any new 'special features', it's very likely that we'll see the new MacBook Pros sometime before the end of WWDC. Conservatively, I expect to see slightly faster processors, possibly a new optical drive, and a 512 MB graphics card as at least a BTO option. If this is all that Apple does, I wouldn't expect prices to drastically change.
For the games that you mentioned, like World of Warcraft and Warcraft 3, this system should have no issues at all running in Mac OS X as both of those apps are Universal. In fact, WoW should run very well. For PC games, there's always the option of putting Windows on your MacBook Pro with Boot Camp. Keep in mind, however, that most graphics cards that are shipping today, even in Windows PCs, do not support DirectX 10, so you'd probably still be playing the waiting game if you were buying a PC.
What it comes down do is a fight between me and my best friend about gaming and his rants and rhetoric are beginning to affect me. That as well as the possible coming release of MBP with the Santa Rosa chipset and robson, it tempts me very much away from picking up one this week. What really would kill or seal the deal is the video card/price.
Blah... ever since I found out WiMax wouldn't be in Santa Rosa (instead being delayed for the next Centrino Branding for 2008) I figure it's nothing to look forward to. On that note... wait as long as you can until you can't wait any longer, if Apple doesn't release a new MBP by then, then just get one now and don't regret it if they release one the day after you buy the current one.
Sebastian