Recommend A New Computer

[19 year mortgage 8itch]

I'm looking for a new computer but am unsure of current specs and off topic loves talking about computer hardware. Functional Requirememnts if you can call them that are:

Laptop

General use - photos/video editing

Sync an iPad to iTunes.

Spec to last 5+ years

A quality tactile product

Sub £1000

Being rushed so that's all I can think of for te moment. I've considered the basic MacBook Pro on a refurb deal but what's putting me off is the fact it has not been updated for 18 months now and the form is obsolete.

[interestrateripoff]

If you want it to last I wouldnt go for a mac book as you cant change the battery. A standard laptop with a detachable battery will last longer.

[LiveinHope]

I'm looking for a new computer but am unsure of current specs and off topic loves talking about computer hardware. Functional Requirememnts if you can call them that are:

Laptop

General use - photos/video editing

Sync an iPad to iTunes.

Spec to last 5+ years

A quality tactile product

Sub £1000

Being rushed so that's all I can think of for the moment. I've considered the basic MacBook Pro on a refurb deal but what's putting me off is the fact it has not been updated for 18 months now and the form is obsolete.

With regard to the list above, any recommendation would depend very much upon your level of video editing.

But if it's just Go Pro-type stuff, the current Macbook Pro's, albeit lacking a refresh, should be more than enough and very capable for the next 5 years I would imagine- although you can never foresee future developments, or changes in your requirements.

Give it plenty of RAM and the only other criteria is the screen size you want.

Edit to change mac pro to Macbook Pro, although it applies to the Mac pro line too.

If you want something budget based upon your specs a 2008 8 core 2.8 Ghz mac pro with 16mb RAM would do you very well. I've got a few of these and was looking at the new Mac Pro. I decided that for my uses I still don't need to upgrade these 5-yr old machines. Uses: Adobe PS suite CS6, Illustrator, After Effects (occasional) etc, Ms Office suite, scientific software (run programs in a few minutes that took overnight in the early 90s, and a few minutes is fast enough), Internet etc. Even the graphics card in these old machines is still OK, although I couldn't run a 4k display, which saves me some money :-)

[19 year mortgage 8itch]

If you want it to last I wouldnt go for a mac book as you cant change the battery. A standard laptop with a detachable battery will last longer.

Battery use is not a concern.

[19 year mortgage 8itch]

Don't tell me I can't change the screen on an iPad either

[Bloo Loo]

I'm looking for a new computer but am unsure of current specs and off topic loves talking about computer hardware. Functional Requirememnts if you can call them that are:

Laptop

General use - photos/video editing

Sync an iPad to iTunes.

Spec to last 5+ years

A quality tactile product

Sub £1000

Being rushed so that's all I can think of for te moment. I've considered the basic MacBook Pro on a refurb deal but what's putting me off is the fact it has not been updated for 18 months now and the form is obsolete.

Laptop....any decent brand that is not home based...like a Sony or other home appliance type....I think the current Toshibas are moving on up fast in the reliability and practicality stakes after years in the doldrums.

video editing...just about anything i5 and above will be great unless you are Pixar.

Make sure you review how to move i tunes to a new computer very carefully...its a bitch if you do it wrong with this PoS software.

Your spec lasts forever, the hard drive might not.

If you are an apple fan, your choice is made for you.

[MrPin]

You will get a very good laptop for under £1000.

Have a look at the MSI ones. I bought one about a year ago. It was end of line, so not quite top spec, but does have full HD screen, and a solid keyboard!

It's described as a gaming machine, so I find the "Knight Rider" LED display malarkey totally useless!

[19 year mortgage 8itch]

Laptop....any decent brand that is not home based...like a Sony or other home appliance type....I think the current Toshibas are moving on up fast in the reliability and practicality stakes after years in the doldrums.

video editing...just about anything i5 and above will be great unless you are Pixar.

Make sure you review how to move i tunes to a new computer very carefully...its a bitch if you do it wrong with this PoS software.

Your spec lasts forever, the hard drive might not.

If you are an apple fan, your choice is made for you.

Any suggestion, what sort of budget would I need?

I'm not an apple fan as such and I've no real experience of OSX but Win8 would be new to me too.

Having played with them a little though, I'd like something as well put together and nice to use as a Mac. However their current form factor no optical drive and tiny on board storage is not really what I'm looking for.

Presumably any mid range machine will have a HDMI out but I'm unsure if I want a BD drive. A FireWire connection would be useful for something I have left to do as well.

[StainlessSteelCat]

Personally, I wouldn't worry about an optical drive. External ones are cheap as chips - around 20 quid for blu-ray off eBay. In my experience, they are also likely to be the thing that fails (I have computers still in use which are seven years old and the only thing that has gone is the optical drive) so perhaps external isn't a bad way to go.

HDMI wise - if you go Apple, you'll need an adapter. Get this from eBay rather than the Apple store. Ditto if you need an USB to Ethernet adapter.

Bear in mind, the Mac doesn't have a huge amount of support for blu-ray. You can hack VLC to play them (apparently) or buy dedicated software. There's nothing that comes with machine. I guess because Apple are too cheap to licence it.

If you have kids at school/college - you may be able to get an educational discount on an Apple laptop. If you end up going Apple - 4GB of RAM and 128GB HD is the minimum you should go for. If you want 5 years of life out of it - I'd consider doubling it, even if you have bump the processor down a bit to meet the budget. My Macbook Air at 2.5 years old is still perfectly fine, but there are times I wish there'd been the chance to boost the RAM to 8GB.

Windows wise, a higher end Lenovo might do the trick. Avoid Sony or Acer like the plague. Acer's failure rate is too high for my liking - and Sony's support is pretty lacking.

Firewire support aside (which is probably going to be hard to find) - whichever route you take, you should end up with a decent machine for a grand. In experience, you'll generally end up with a more polished experience with Apple, but potentially more bang for your buck with a PC (if you choose carefully).

[Bloo Loo]

Any suggestion, what sort of budget would I need?

I'm not an apple fan as such and I've no real experience of OSX but Win8 would be new to me too.

Having played with them a little though, I'd like something as well put together and nice to use as a Mac. However their current form factor no optical drive and tiny on board storage is not really what I'm looking for.

Presumably any mid range machine will have a HDMI out but I'm unsure if I want a BD drive. A FireWire connection would be useful for something I have left to do as well.

I have a modest toshiba pro, i3, does all I need and more...W8, the machine is equipped to use it and its OK and easy to use, providing you can work the reverse way MS wants (you run the app and find the file rather than how most users do it, find the file and run the app)

As for budget, take a look on the Toshiba website, find your spec and theres your budget.

Cant be much you wont get at £1000....much expense at the higher end is spent on power and weight saving, whilst bottom end have lower res monitors and less capable video acceleration.

Mine plays Word of Warcraft just fine with a mouse attached. got an LED screen too,...oh and HDMI...

[Deft]

Look for a few USB 3.0 ports and an SSD or hybrid hard drive.

[Habeas Domus]

Macbook Air

[19 year mortgage 8itch]

With regard to the list above, any recommendation would depend very much upon your level of video editing.

But if it's just Go Pro-type stuff, the current Macbook Pro's, albeit lacking a refresh, should be more than enough and very capable for the next 5 years I would imagine- although you can never foresee future developments, or changes in your requirements.

Give it plenty of RAM and the only other criteria is the screen size you want.

Edit to change mac pro to Macbook Pro, although it applies to the Mac pro line too.

If you want something budget based upon your specs a 2008 8 core 2.8 Ghz mac pro with 16mb RAM would do you very well. I've got a few of these and was looking at the new Mac Pro. I decided that for my uses I still don't need to upgrade these 5-yr old machines. Uses: Adobe PS suite CS6, Illustrator, After Effects (occasional) etc, Ms Office suite, scientific software (run programs in a few minutes that took overnight in the early 90s, and a few minutes is fast enough), Internet etc. Even the graphics card in these old machines is still OK, although I couldn't run a 4k display, which saves me some money :-)

Sorry , I missed this yesterday. By 'video', I just mean finally getting round to editing a load of kids/holiday footage. Nothing fancy, just more power, ram and storage than I have currently.

[19 year mortgage 8itch]

Personally, I wouldn't worry about an optical drive. External ones are cheap as chips - around 20 quid for blu-ray off eBay. In my experience, they are also likely to be the thing that fails (I have computers still in use which are seven years old and the only thing that has gone is the optical drive) so perhaps external isn't a bad way to go.

HDMI wise - if you go Apple, you'll need an adapter. Get this from eBay rather than the Apple store. Ditto if you need an USB to Ethernet adapter.

Bear in mind, the Mac doesn't have a huge amount of support for blu-ray. You can hack VLC to play them (apparently) or buy dedicated software. There's nothing that comes with machine. I guess because Apple are too cheap to licence it.

If you have kids at school/college - you may be able to get an educational discount on an Apple laptop. If you end up going Apple - 4GB of RAM and 128GB HD is the minimum you should go for. If you want 5 years of life out of it - I'd consider doubling it, even if you have bump the processor down a bit to meet the budget. My Macbook Air at 2.5 years old is still perfectly fine, but there are times I wish there'd been the chance to boost the RAM to 8GB.

Windows wise, a higher end Lenovo might do the trick. Avoid Sony or Acer like the plague. Acer's failure rate is too high for my liking - and Sony's support is pretty lacking.

Firewire support aside (which is probably going to be hard to find) - whichever route you take, you should end up with a decent machine for a grand. In experience, you'll generally end up with a more polished experience with Apple, but potentially more bang for your buck with a PC (if you choose carefully).

I'm trying to reduce my computer hardware footprint. Therefore I want an all in one solution rather than add-ons like external drives. I'm planning on ripping a load of CDs and getting rid of them initially.

Ditto then solid state Macs. For the budget, I think that 128gb is not enough day to day storage and I'll be messing about with external HDD far more. Not just for back up.

Also agreed on the RAM. I'm not sure 4gb is going to cut the mustard, long term. Adding RAM and changing HDD is something I've always done to increase the longevity of my (windows) computers. Macs are historically a little different but I am not confident it is completely unimpprtant. I can't get the full educational discount only the nominal 6% so the best option are the refurb models at 15% discount.

[19 year mortgage 8itch]

Macbook Air

See above.

Very nice computer but missing a couple of functional things.

[MrPin]

You are better off stuffing it full of RAM, I don't like SSD. They stop working!

[Boomer Baby]

See above.

Very nice computer but missing a couple of functional things.

The lowest cost current 13" MacBook Pro has an optical drive and comes with a standard 500 GB hard-drive: options include hard-disc double that size or solid-state up to 512 GB and up to 8 GB of ram.

My two year old MacBook Pro has a slightly slower processor, 360 GB hard-drive and 8 GB of ram. I use it for "location" audio and video editing as part of my work as well as running standard office applications, internet and email.

With the latest OS X version installed and everything running well I cannot see any reason to change although when I do I'm unsure about the optical drive as I've found I hardly ever use it these days.

I recently used a Toshiba Pro machine for a couple of days. Aside from OS, the main downside was the touchpad, which I found much less sensitive and accurate than the Mac equivalent. Going back to Windows took a little getting used to and the build quality was not up to Apple standard but as a working tool it was better than OK and a lot cheaper than the MacBook.

In round figure terms I guess the difference between a MacBook Pro and well-specced Windows laptop might be £3-400. I expect to get about 4-5 years use before changing so allowing for the greater residual value of the Mac I imagine it's costing me £40-£50 a year to work with something I prefer but don't think is immeasurably better than anything else.

Just my 2 cents worth

[LiveinHope]

Sorry , I missed this yesterday. By 'video', I just mean finally getting round to editing a load of kids/holiday footage. Nothing fancy, just more power, ram and storage than I have currently.

Any of the macbook pros released in the last 24 months would be adequate for what you want to do, just max out the ram and stick in a 7200 Itb HD, if you don't want externals. Personally, I also buy OEM 2.5 or 3.5 disk drives and cheap HD enclosures for storage and backup.

[AteMoose]

surface 2 or a surface 2 pro depending on if you need desktop apps beyond office.

[19 year mortgage 8itch]

Any of the macbook pros released in the last 24 months would be adequate for what you want to do, just max out the ram and stick in a 7200 Itb HD, if you don't want externals. Personally, I also buy OEM 2.5 or 3.5 disk drives and cheap HD enclosures for storage and backup.

Back up is fine but I dont want to be pulling stuff out all the time because I need to get stuff off a drive.

500gb+ should be enough to keep a large enough working storage area.

[19 year mortgage 8itch]

The lowest cost current 13" MacBook Pro has an optical drive and comes with a standard 500 GB hard-drive: options include hard-disc double that size or solid-state up to 512 GB and up to 8 GB of ram.

My two year old MacBook Pro has a slightly slower processor, 360 GB hard-drive and 8 GB of ram. I use it for "location" audio and video editing as part of my work as well as running standard office applications, internet and email.

With the latest OS X version installed and everything running well I cannot see any reason to change although when I do I'm unsure about the optical drive as I've found I hardly ever use it these days.

I recently used a Toshiba Pro machine for a couple of days. Aside from OS, the main downside was the touchpad, which I found much less sensitive and accurate than the Mac equivalent. Going back to Windows took a little getting used to and the build quality was not up to Apple standard but as a working tool it was better than OK and a lot cheaper than the MacBook.

In round figure terms I guess the difference between a MacBook Pro and well-specced Windows laptop might be £3-400. I expect to get about 4-5 years use before changing so allowing for the greater residual value of the Mac I imagine it's costing me £40-£50 a year to work with something I prefer but don't think is immeasurably better than anything else.

Just my 2 cents worth

Pretty much why I would be prepared to buy one if I thought it was the best option but I'm hoping to check other options first.

As I've not been anywhere to look at some laptops yet, I'm not getting very far.

[19 year mortgage 8itch]

surface 2 or a surface 2 pro depending on if you need desktop apps beyond office.

A tablet? Won't storage be low and no optical drive? I've pretty much ignored the development of the surface as its never been something I'm likely to need.

[19 year mortgage 8itch]

I was in a shop yesterday and took 5 mins to look at some laptops. There seemed to be a load of machines up to £500 and then nothing to about £1000. Which is a pain in the ****.

I can see the machines are sold on specs bit I want stuff that isn't easily specced/quantified - good build, decent keyboard, decent screen.

I was sorely tempted just to say ****** it and buy something really cheap, around £300.

[MarkG]

A tablet? Won't storage be low and no optical drive? I've pretty much ignored the development of the surface as its never been something I'm likely to need.

Yes. The Surface is a solution in search of a problem, which is why Microsoft had to dump $1,000,000,000 worth of the ARM version a while back. God knows why they're still pushing them

[MarkG]

I was in a shop yesterday and took 5 mins to look at some laptops. There seemed to be a load of machines up to £500 and then nothing to about £1000. Which is a pain in the ****.

As far as I can see, manufacturers are using Windows 8 to justify price rises. 'But it converts into a tablet and has a touch screen and all kinds lf other crap no-one in their right mind would want,' Finding a decent laptop without that crap is becoming hard, and it all pushes up the price.

BTW, this site really sucks on a tablet.