[Shacs] switching to mac - need some advice

[ccheney at cheney.cx]

Bronius,

You'll probably want at least 2GB of RAM if you are planning to run  
Photoshop and Parallels(*). The MacBook Pro's come with 2GB default  
though so you should be set for that. If you want 4GB though you would  
probably be better off buying the memory yourself and upgrading it  
since the Apple 4GB upgrade appears to cost $750, 4GB (2x2GB) can be  
found online elsewhere for $225(*).

As far as hard drive space goes that depends on how many photos you  
want to store on the laptop, don't forget that Photoshop PSD's can be  
quite large. Also, add in the space you need for Windows as well.

I recently bought a Toshiba A205-4577(*) laptop for $750 from Best  
Buy. It's not a Mac laptop but it does have a Core 2 Duo 1.73GHz, 1GB  
RAM, 160GB HD, DVD-RW, firewire, 11g, and webcam. I run Ubuntu Gutsy  
on my laptop. By the way I work for Canonical/Ubuntu on OpenOffice now.

Chris

http://www.parallels.com/
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820178166
http://www.toshibadirect.com/td/b2c/rdet.jsp?poid=368632

Quoting Bronius Motekaitis <bronius at bcswebstudio.com>:

> I need to spec a new laptop for myself, and I want to make The Switch (tm).
> Would someone please toss me some simple specs for a decent Mac notebook
> from a developer's perspective?  I'll be doing some degree of Photoshop'ing
> and lots of web development.  Might run a local apache or some other web
> server to run rails and an accompanying IDE.  Oh, and will definitely need
> to switch over to Windows on occasion, at least for old times sake...
>
> Advice?
>
> wanna be mac guy,
> -bronius