Okso, i need a macbook for school. Im getting a loan for one, but tbh i dont wanna spend 2000$ on a macbook pro, I'd prefer a macbook. But i was told by my teachers that we need at least 2 gigs of RAM on it, and i know that the regular Macbook only has one. could i just have the macbook upgraded to 2 gigs of ram, or would it just be better to get the pro?
The latest generation of MacBooks come with 2 GB of RAM, expandable to 4 GB. You can visit http://www.apple.com/macbook/ for more details.
I personally have only bought professional style macs they last longer and are alot faster typing on a macbook pro 2.5
As has been said - the newer Macbooks come with 2GB of RAM as a default. So that's really not an issue. I have a 2 year old Macbook Pro though, and I love it (even if it cost me €2000 :eek: )- but if I was buying now I'd go for a Macbook and add extra RAM to bring it up to the maximum amount - I don't really need a powerful graphics card because I'm not playing WoW any more, and I personally prefer the 13" size. For me, the 15" size of the Macbook Pro is a little bigger than I like.
The Macbook should be more than enough for school and other things. If Björk can do a liveset on an old Macbook, it should be powerful enough for schoolwork :icon_wink
One bit of advice. If you do decide to buy extra ram for your notebook then I would recommend buying from a third-party vendor. Sure it's convenient to just select the extra memory as an option when you put together your notebook but Apple marks up the price of RAM as much as 200%. An example. To get an extra 2 GB (for a total of 4 GB) of DDR3 Ram into one of the new 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo Macbooks it would cost $150 extra. If you were to go to a place like Crucial.com for your RAM it would only cost you $71 for the same RAM. Sure you have to install it yourself but it really isn't that hard to do and for over $75 of savings it is worth it to look up a quick step-by-step howto.
^Installing RAM on the new Macbooks is fairly straightforward thankfully. I'd personally go for 4GB of RAM.. That's the sweet spot these days (although I'm considering to go up to 8GB on my PC because I need a fair bit more). You may be able to get a refurbished macbook from the previous generation for a whole lot less though if you don't mind it not having an as powerful CPU and graphics.
Ignore my post above about buying your RAM elsewhere. You can normally get it much cheaper but I completely forgot to take into account that the 2 GB that comes standard is from two 1 GB sticks. In order to actually put 4 GB in there you'd have to take those two sticks out and replace them with two 2 GB sticks. In this case the savings are minimal.
Actually you would save a lot.. If you went for a 1x4GB stick it'd be uneconomical. 2x2GB still remains good value.
Installing RAM is about one of the easiest procedures on a laptop. If you wanna do that it shouldn't be hard to find a tutorial and do it yourself. It might be easier to order from apple.com and get it preloaded with 2 gigs of RAM just to save yourself the hassle. Remember to buy from apple.com and get the education discount!
I suppose you could go for a single 4 GB stick and that would be great but then you wouldn't be able to take advantage of dual-channel mode. I'm not sure if the improvement is really that big. Either way, I still think the big OEM companies like Apple, Dell, HP, etc really gouge you with RAM upgrades. I've always bought my memory from another company and installed it myself. All this computer talk makes me want to put together a new computer. My current rig is a few years old and it's starting to show its age. The only problem is no money! It still serves my needs but a guy can dream, eh?
Don't know the specs of the new Macbooks but upgrading RAM on a Macbook (New or old) is pretty straightforward (so much can't be said for the Macbook Air, iBook, Powerbook, or iMac). A 2GB stick of name brand RAM can be bought for $35. The Macbook is also a lot more portable than the Macbook pro. Yes Apple, and others gouge for upgrades. I needn't go any further than look at the Black Macbook. It costs $200 more than a similar spec (other than hard drive) White Macbook. The price difference between the two hard drives is $15 retail. That's 1333% markup. It is actually cheaper to buy the bigger hard drive, buy an external enclosure, swap the drives and put the smaller one in the enclosure. Not only do you spend less, you also end up with an extra external hard drive and money left over. I'm always amused by how the sweet spot keeps increasing. I normally don't use more than 512MB of RAM, rarely use more than 1GB, yet have 2GB in my computer.
Heh.. I always end up using around 4000MB of RAM, leaving me with only 96MB to play with. My problem is I multitask too much.. I've got 2 monitors (getting another two soon) and because of it I'll generally have Windows Media Center or a game or something in one monitor and Firefox/MSN/Yahoo/Skype in the other. And then when I'm working on my website.. I generally have FF/MSN/Yahoo/Skype open, as well as Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks and sometimes Soundbooth. Chews up a whole lotta RAM.
If you don't need it until the next school year (I don't know when you're starting), then you might want to wait until August if you want a free iPod, and sometimes they throw in a printer, too.
