Tong Family

With Apple shipping Macbook Pro’s with the “Core Duo”:http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2740 processor, they are really super viable notebooks. In reading Anandtech, the really big thing to give up is that they only have 2.5 hours of battery life. I’m spoiled by the slower, but very long lived Sony VAIO VGN-TX750B that I’ve been using (actually, I’ve had three variatns, the VGN-T140, VGNTX650), they are perfect for just everyday computing, and are incredibly light.

The incredibly nice 17″ Notebook is $2600 with 1GB memory, 120GB hard disk and a nice glossy screen. With it, performance is good enough to run photoshop, etc. A dream machine and what is even cooler is that with “Parallel Workstation”:http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2740&p=12 you can run Windows XP applications in a window under OSx. Now that is cool!

His main recommendation and caution is to check the “Apple Support Forums”:http://dicussion/apple.com as there are lots of geeks out there looking at the many Apple problems, like the fact it whines or gets very hot, etc.

Also to save some money, you can get a “refurbished”:http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/wo/1.RSLID?mco=2483FA83&nclm=CertifiedMac MacBook Pro at a nice savings,m so for instance a $2500 MacBook Pro 15″ sells for $1949 and folks on the “forums”:http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=684138&tstart=0 have good experiend with them.

The refurbishined MacBok Pro 17″ with 1GB and 120GB is $2400 compared with $2800 list and $2600 academic price for a new machine.