Quick Mac question

[aeromed202]

The Grad is getting a new Mac for herself and will need to do so tomorrow to take advantage of a student discount and a couple of gift cards to defray the cost. She is considering the Mac Air (too thin to be durable?) with a solid state HD, or the Mac Book Pro with retina display (very good I hear) with standard HD. She asked me about SSHDs, if there was any advantage over other types. I said in so many words that I'd heard SS drives weren't quite ready for prime time and she should stick to standard drives. She intends to keep this MAC for a few years so I'd like to hear opinions or experiences from people regarding SSHDs or even the comps themselves. Thanks for any advice.

[airtj]

Here is some information about solid state hard drives versus regular hard drives. Solid state hard drives boot up faster than a regular hard drive. I would also caution that some notebooks don't come with a DVD/CD drive. Also if you want to run any windows programs you need to check into programs like parallels, another draw back is that you would also need to buy a version of windows.


http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2404258,00.asp

http://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/

[KellyB]

Not to be an alarmist, but there has been a serious security problem discovered recently with Apple iPhones, etc. I don't believe the problem extends to the laptops/tablets, but you might want to check it out.

See, for example:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/25/apple-issues-fix-for-security-problem-on-macs/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

[ColoKent]

Aeromed...did your daughter pick up her new Mac? If so, what model and what are the specs?

Kent

[aeromed202]

Yep she did and ended up with the newest Mac Pro. Basically, the Air came with about 125G memory but her current LT is maxed out at about 110+. So for about the the same price, the Pro came with 250G SSHD, 8G RAM and Retina graphics. It was around $1300 at BB, which was also the only place offering the discounts she qualified for which knocked that price down enough for her to get MS Office too. Since Macs can't be upgraded with new innards like other brands we thought she'd better get the most memory from the start so she went with the Pro. Ole dad kicked in a little to take her Asus off her hands so I'll be reinstalling W7 on that thing soon too. It also means I'll be pondering what to do with a 12 year old Dell LT with XP on it. For laughs I might do one last reinstall, toss in a couple of service packs and use it for recipe storage or something.

[ColoKent]

Man, she's going to have a blast with that baby!

Kent