Macbook pro - stop me

[nick]

Thanks for all the advice and opinions.

Have just paid for:
2.4 GHZ chip
15.4" matt display,
2GB RAM
160GB fast drive
3 yrs apple care
airport express
sleeve

£1,586 - about 10 days wait for delivery though

edit to add: just noticed Bobs edit re chip speed, oh well, too late now

 

[Bob_the_lost]

Not really, you can always ring them up and cancel it. Embarrassing but not fatal. Or just take pleasure in a very fast laptop.

 

[nick]

Not really, you can always ring them up and cancel it

But I won't - and you know it

Thanks everyone though

 

[Bob_the_lost]

I probably wouldn't either

 

[Dask]

Thanks for all the advice and opinions.

Have just paid for:
2.4 GHZ chip
15.4" matt display,
2GB RAM
160GB fast drive
3 yrs apple care
airport express
sleeve

£1,586 - about 10 days wait for delivery though

edit to add: just noticed Bobs edit re chip speed, oh well, too late now

Nick how did you get that spec for that price?

I'm looking to buy a similar machine, and when I spec the machine up on the apple site it comes to: £1,978.01

Even with educational discount it comes to: £1,794.23

Does that price you've quoted included VAT?

 

[The Groke]

Thanks for all the advice and opinions.

Have just paid for:
2.4 GHZ chip
15.4" matt display,
2GB RAM
160GB fast drive
3 yrs apple care
airport express
sleeve

£1,586 - about 10 days wait for delivery though

edit to add: just noticed Bobs edit re chip speed, oh well, too late now

Sleep well knowing you did the the right thing.

 

[nick]

M9470B/A AIRPORT EXPRESS BASE STATION-GBR 1 50.00
TL992LL/A INCASE NEOPRENE SLEEVE 17 -BLK/BLK-USA 1 21.23
S2366Z/A EMEA CC-HE Contract Uplift PowerBook 1 50.00
Z0EC MBP 15/2.4 CTO 1 1,229.00
2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
2GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM - 2x1GB
160GB Serial ATA Drive@7200rpm
SuperDrive 8X
15 Widescreen Display
No Modem
No Optional S/W
BkLit Keyboard/Mac OS-B
Country Kit-GBR


Total: £ 1,350.23
Discount: -£ 172.36
VAT @17.50%: £ 236.30
Order Total: £ 1,586.53

extract from the invoice.
Called 0800 039 1010. Told them I wanted to buy for someone at a university (I have a valid email adress for the person, who also actually exists). They input the email address. tell tehm it is a bit of a present so I would prefer all contact and delivery to be for me, they amend the email address to mine. Bob's your mother's brother.

PS I have subsequently cancelled the case since they put a 17" one on from my original spec and didn't change the size when I altered screen sizes

 

[Structaural]

It is not easy....


I read the other day that it is technically possible, but doesn't work that well and requires a lot of arsing about........by all accounts not really worth ones time other than to prove you can do it.

I think you have to have some fairly specific chipsets/CPU's and other compatible hardware as well.

http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

 

[Xanadu]

http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

I keep meaning to give that a go. My hardware seems to be supported.

 

[Dask]

extract from the invoice.
Called 0800 039 1010. Told them I wanted to buy for someone at a university (I have a valid email adress for the person, who also actually exists). They input the email address. tell tehm it is a bit of a present so I would prefer all contact and delivery to be for me, they amend the email address to mine. Bob's your mother's brother.

PS I have subsequently cancelled the case since they put a 17" one on from my original spec and didn't change the size when I altered screen sizes

You can get the educational discount on the website, I'm not sure why it's over £200 cheaper when you phone them up though...

This is the spec I'm looking at:

* 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
* 2GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM - 2x1GB
* 160GB Serial ATA drive (7200rpm)
* MacBook Pro 15-inch Widescreen Display
* SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
* Backlit Keyboard (English) & Mac OS (English)
* AppleCare Protection Plan for MacBook Pro - Auto-enroll

# Bluetooth 2.0
# Apple Remote
# Power Adapter
# Battery


Price: £1,527.00
VAT: £267.23
Subtotal: £1,794.23

That's using the apple education store, where you enter the name of the institution/school and it gives you the discount...

Is the store for higher education offering an even greater discount? It says that I have to be in an academic network ".ac.uk" to access.

 

[Crispy]

Is the store for higher education offering an even greater discount? It says that I have to be in an academic network ".ac.uk" to access.

It'd be a bugger if it was - we used sparrow's educational discount when we got ours and it did seem like a rather small %age.

 

[Dask]

Seems weird to me that you can get a macbookpro and pay between £1500 to £1950 for the same machine directly from Apple.

Except that when you get the £1500 deal, you get an airport express and a sleeve included in that money.

Can anyone explain these discount structures to us?

 

[Crispy]

airport express is built in, it's not an option.

 

[nick]

I don't think the sleeve and airport were part of any deal. It's just that, heady with the excitement of spending, I said yes when he asked if I want them.

Salesman wasn't the sharpest tool in the box, so he may have mistakenly given the wrong discount . Maybe the ac.uk thing is a better discount, but you can bypass the requirement to be on a uni network by giving the tele-sales people a kosher uni email address

I seem to have the "EMEA CC-HE Contract Uplift PowerBook" care plan for £50 + VAT, rather than the AppleCare Protection Plan for MacBook Pro - Auto-enroll (170ish). Does anyone know what the difference betwen these is, apart from the price?

In any case I think the lesson learned is that it could be worth spending 10 minutes on the phone before you click on "checkout" with a web order, just to see if it is cheaper that way.

I guess that the relative cheapness of educational stuff is either:
a) apple caring about the future of our planet and wanting to help them along
b) an opportunity to indoctrinate into the way of the mac at an early age, for which a hit on marginal profit is well worth catching a lifelong consumer

 

[Dask]

airport express is built in, it's not an option.

Airport express is the base station, not the name of the inbuilt wireless card that Apple produce.

 

[Crispy]

ah. well that might end p being surplus, if you've got wifi already...

 

[nick]

ah. well that might end p being surplus, if you've got wifi already

I was thinking that it would be an easy way for me to send music to my hifi, alternatively I could plug it into a printer and print wirelessly. Was I horibly wrong?

 

[tarannau]

Nah. You're entirely right. They're useful little things which look like plugs - it's how I link my hi fi to my mac for example.

 

[Crispy]

aaaaaaaaaaaah! it's one of those things. yes, that will do exaclty as you say. I'm considering getting one myself actually, as a print server and so me or sparrow can pipe sound to the hifi without making cable spaghetti.

 

[Dask]

Funnily enough my Airport Express stop working last night after 2 1/2 years of being on solidly.

When they don't break, they are great.

 

[Crispy]

does it only work with iTunes, or can quicktime etc. also output sound to it?

 

[tarannau]

does it only work with iTunes, or can quicktime etc. also output sound to it?

Basically there's a drop down menu at the bottom right of itunes that allows you to select speakers (in this case airport) so it's fairly limited out of the box.

However you can buy shareware called Airfoil which can sort out sound from other applications, including QT I think

 

[Crispy]

Grrrr. So much stuff that should by rights be a quick little free app gets made into shareware on mac.

 

[Dask]

Very true, however you can get a "evaluation" version from various sources.

 

[tarannau]

Ahem, like where...

 

[Crispy]

yeah, where's best for evaluation versions?

 

[Crispy]

Ah, just found out that there's a lag between playback and speakers, so pointless for movies etc.

Hmmm, not so useful now.

 

[Dask]

Usenet, there is currently an NZB on Newzbin for it.

 

[ChrisFilter]

That bloody Apple credit makes it very tempting to buy a MacBook. I must resist. I don't need one.

 

[ChrisFilter]

Pfft, been on the Dell website and you can get a better spec, in a slick package, for £700 less.

Can you install OSX on a Windows laptop?