I am thinking about buying a mac, and I am thinking about buying a laptop. Seems logical to combine the two. The trouble is money, as always, and with the dollar as cheap as it is these days, it is very tempting to buy in the US. The machine in my price range is a macbook MA 699, and here you pay [FONT="]€[/FONT]1029 for that, which is about $1329 in the US. Best buy has that machine for $1099.- with a 20gb bigger hd and twice the memory. The question is - is it worth the risk? I wouldn't need shipping, as this is a plan for if I come to the US in October. But I doubt an apple center here would honour US warranty. So I'd love to hear about how a macbook never breaks, if that's the case. I need a macbook, not a notebook, as I want to have a mac to test/make sites on. Only this morning I found out safari has different ideas about treating <DIV> tags than either IE or Firefox, so I'm flying blind without a mac to test. I will only need to do webdesign/programming on it, but that includes photoshop, so enough memory is a must. Another downside to buying in the States is that I'll need to pay it all at once - here I can pay over a period of 6 months without paying extra. My second question is: what kind of a mac do I need to emulate a PC properly? Is it only the latest mac notebook that does that well? Or would the macbook I mentioned be able to do that too?
First of all, there is a Safari 3 for Windows beta out - if the only reason you really need it is for testing web sites, that'll have Apple's rendering engine in it and you've then got no need to switch. On the other hand, any MacBook/MacBook Pro should be able to run Boot Camp and/or Parallels/VMWare Fusion, last I checked anyway, and they should all run XP at the very least very well. On some of the older MB/MBPs, Vista might be a little slow. Avoid the MacBooks if you want to do gaming, but the MacBook Pros handle it nicely - fired up Call of Juarez's demo on my Windows partition the other day and it ran smooth as silk. I couldn't tell you if AppleCare works well across the pond, but I seem to recall that they are bound to at the very least, the continent. O2C or Lanz would probably know more - I'm a Mac Newbie, but I'm pretty good when it comes to hardware or Windows on a Mac (just to send Lanz up the wall ).
Probably one of the new Intel-based Macs with dual-boot capabilities is what you need. Reliability . . . my experience with Apple computers is that their reliability is superior to most Dell/HP/clone PCs. Can't speak to laptops, tho. But the G4 Powerbook I have is only about a year, year and a half old and is working fine. Since there's a version of Safari out that runs on WinDoze, that's really all you need if I read your post correctly. I use Safari pretty much exclusively at home, and I've yet to run into a site it can't handle. If you're doing web development, just stick to W3C standards and you shouldn't have any problems. Generally it's the non-standard or bleeding-edge stuff that causes web browsers to puke. Not always, but usually.
Lanz, there have been some growing pains with the Intel transition, as I'm sure you'll agree. However, regarding the warranties, I just realized something. What you can do is buy the laptop here in the US, go back over to Europeland, and then pick up AppleCare from a local Apple Store. That really should do you nicely - you can pick up AppleCare anytime within a year of purchase, even if you do so expressly because, say, your mainboard (or logic board if you want froofy Apple terms) toasted itself. By the way, because of how they designed the power adapter, I think you could also buy new plugs so that you can plug it in to whatever crazy power system y'all are using. Not sure about that, though, but that's another concern.
As Kyle said, talk to Apple, if you buy Applecare you should be fine. Mrs Floyd is a Mac diva and they do break from time to time.
I realised the bit about Safari for windows yesterday, and I'm using it as I type. I do webdevelopment and I am altering a site for a friend on the side, but she told me yesterday some div' positioning was off - everything was on the left. I checked it out with Safari for windows, and it looked fine. Now she may have checked while I was still editing the stylesheet, I'l find out today. If not, the SfW does not render sites exactly as Safari for Macs - which would truly suck of course. Buying 'Applecare' here sounds like a plan. I don't know about pricing and if it works, but we'e got an Apple center here in town, so I'll stop by today. I don't plan on gaming on the macbook at all, so it's great to hear they will do winxp properly. The main reason for a mac is the webdevelopment, yeah, so if Safari for windows does that perfectly, it might be an idea to choose the cheaper Windows laptops. On the other hand, while my current employer does not use macs, it's not a bad idea to get used to working with them. As for Safari for windows, I am running the v3.03 beta now. I'e noticed a few flaws - It doesn't render the insets of the quoteboxes properly, the lighter, bottom and right hand lines are gone. Typing things like 'don't' is a pain because for the apostrophe to appear, you have to type a space after. In normal windows applications, if you type a letter after the apostrophe, both the apostrophe and the letter are shown. Not so in SfW - it only shows the apostrophe. The letter must be there, hidden, though, because as you move back over the letter, it stops there as if having to pass an invisible letter (which is probably exactly what happens). Other than that, SfW looks great. Thanks for the info, I will get back to this after I've been to the Apple center
Make sure the voltage from your eletrical outlets won't fry the thing before you plug it in to charge... you may need a converter.
just went to the apple store. They did say I'll need a powerconverer, but I expected that. That said - even standard Apple warranty is worldwide - so if I buy it in the US, I can hand it in here to get it fixed, should it break. They may charge a small additional fee, but that's like15 to 20 euros, which is no problem considering the price difference is about 300 euros. So yeah, if I actually go to the US in october, I'll probably come home with a macbook, if I can manage to save money for it that fast
You will need a different plug, obviously, but I plugged my powerbook into Belgium just fine while I was there this summer. Unless the MacBook Pro has a different (stupider) AC adaptor, I don't know why you couldn't just pick up a plug adaptor for 5 euro.
Just make sure the power supply is autoswitching for 220/120 volts... (many are). Mburton where are you from? I thought your home used the same voltage as Belgium?
I'm from the US. We have 110v AC here, and I'm pretty sure Belgium and the rest of the world use 220v (?)
