Trying to decide between these two computers;

For 36 monthly payments of £29.46 inc three years support/warranty etc
HP Pavillion DV7 Notebook Core i7-7200QM 1.6GHz, 6MB Smart Cache.
4 GB ram, 500GB 17.3 inch LED Brightview 1600 x 900. ATI 1GB etc etc etc

OR;

For 36 months at £49.34 inc three years AppleCare protection plan
Apple MacBook Pro 15 inch i5 2.53GhHz, 3MB Smart Cache
4GB ram, 500GB. Mac OSX Snow Leopard. 1440 x 900. nVidia 256MB

I have always used PCs but many freinds big up the Mac, due to it’s stability, ease of use and overall polished-ness compared to sometimes unstable and admin ‘sytem admin heavy’ pc’s. I use my PC for basic photo and music organisation, surfing the web and a bit of game playing. Can you perhaps give me any advice from personal opinion or experience. I like the idea of having the ‘quality’ of the Mac, but it’s a lot more expensive for what i see as a lower spec’ed machine. I understand that Mac’s will dual-boot to Windows?. Will my phones (HTC, Nokia and Blackberry) and external hardrives work without fuss?. Will this machine be able to play games (such as Dawn of War II) in Windows without slowing down?

Any feedback very welcome.

Thanks

Topper

You’re paying for it for 3 years?

The Mac will at least still be worth something by the time you’ve finally paid it all off.

Is that the case? I was/am looking at both being worth next to nowt by then, ie i’m not worried about residual value as i will pass it on to family.

Thanks

You can dual boot and it does work ok but not the best. FWIW i tried the games route on my iMac but now just use a PS3. Still wouldn’t want a PC for home now though.

Effinchafing rarely talks sense but in this case, he at least appears to be. 🙂

Older Macs certainly seem to hold their value quite well. The issue with your requirements however is that you want to play games. My experience of windows dual booted in my macbook is that it does run pretty slow and I’d expect that games wouldn’t work too well. That being said my mac is 3-4 years old so newer ones may be better.

I have an iMac with a three year Apple Care pack.

Only needed the warranty (so far) for the peripherals (wireless keyboard & mouse) but found them excellent to deal with.

We (Wife & I) moved to Apple a couple of years ago and have never found a problem with the use of phones, generic MP3 playes, USB drives etc. In fact quite the opposite. Even stuff that says non Apple compatible works as it should.

Security seems better despite not running a specific anti virus etc.

Parallels 6 on a recent Mac should be just fine for games – no need to dual boot, I have to use it at work due to their insistence on MS Exchange. Windows 7 on my iMac is quicker than the same running on a 6 month old decent Dell desktop…

I quite like Macs; but to pay nearly 40% more for an inferior laptop seems a bit ott – especially if you are interested in playing games; where the extra performance from the GFX card and the higher res display could make the biggest difference. Get the cheaper one; put £20 in the bank every month and enjoy your £700 lump sum at the end of three years by buying some new bike bits 🙂

Oh and parallels is fine for productivity / office apps; but I certainly wouldn’t use it for gaming.

Well I’d always go for a Mac, because I’ve used them for 18 years, but I wouldn’t want to be paying it off for so long. Can you not afford to pay it off over a shorter period of time?

As for spec; Macs do more with less. IE, they’re more efficient when it comes to graphics processing etc. Vastly superior OS. Ability to use Windoze as well (someone will be along to tell you that you can install Mac OS on a PC, but it’s proper PITA, you need to be a geek to get it to work and then it won’t always work propperly anyway). Tend to have better quality hardware than all but a few (similarly priced) PC laptops.

Macs are basically how all computers should be. I happily pay more.

I’ve got the same Macbook, love it, go for it.

Macs do more with less

Arguably for some stuff yes; the base operating system certainly has a smaller footprint and requires less resources. However for any modern gaming (especially on a laptop) then raw power is king.

Oh and fwiw (in case I come across as some sort of windows fanboy) I dislike both options and would prefer to stick linux on it. That’s not something I’d recommend in this instance tho ….

On those specs and prices, I’d go for the HP every time… the MacBook is just outclassed on pretty much everything, and it costs 40% more!

And if you are playing games, the biggest difference between the two will be the 17″ screen on the HP vs the 15″ in the Mac.

And finally, while the MacBook might be worth slightly more than the HP after 3 years, the difference in prices certainly won’t be the same as the £700 you’d have saved in buying the HP.

For games the GPU is important. Which model is it in the PC?

Bear in mind it needs to be a fair bit more powerful to drive that bigger display at its native resolution (i.e. not look awful).

I sold a 3yo MBP for £500 recently FWIW.

So your option is either:

1. a better spec’d machine with a a larger display and £700 cash in your hand or

2. A mac.

Take the HP.

I sold a 3yo MBP for £500 recently FWIW.

Still not £700, and you could have had a better PC for those 3 years, and the initial outlay would have been less……………..

One of our uni PC rooms went Mac, suprisingly enough nothing worked, no one could figure out how to use them, and they were dog slow compared to the PC’s (which bear in mind were supposed to be being replaced).

Your experience may vary.

I much prefer using Macs, but if I was into gaming I’d probably go with the PC.

I would like to point out that W7 has closed the gap on Macs significantly in my opinion.

I would like to point out that W7 has closed the gap on Macs significantly in my opinion.

Agreed. A HP is still going to be worth **** all in 3 years though whereas a mac will probably still hold some value.

Your externals may need reformatting to whatever macs use as they don’t like ntfs. I think you can get something called NTFS 3G which lets you use ntfs hdds on a mac, though.

I also don’t believe that Snow Leopard performs better on the same hardware. I’m running both SL and W7 on the same pc and both perform the same for things like Adobe CS, 3D things and video work. You just have a more sluggish mouse on the mac side as the default accelleration is really crap imo 😉

I play many games via bootcamp on my iMac and they run well, bit slower to load maps but otherwise no real difference.

I would like to point out that I am a massive PC fanboy

Fixed that for you molgrips. 😉

I’m not a PC fanboy, I’m a realist! And an anti-mac-fanboy… as in I am anti people who big up their computers unreasonably… so yah boo sucks.

I am a mac fanboi, but given the options you have presented and the use you want to make of it, I’d go with the HP.

Is future value a good reason to buy though? Surely suitabilty for the task in hand is ultimately the only reason to buy one or the other? Given what you’ve said you want to do with it, you should buy the HP, and pocket the difference. There’s no good reason not to have Windows, and the HP has a better overall spec IMO

I use windows 7 on bootcamp and in VMware fusion, and on bootcamp, it flies.

Thanks to all for the replies.

You have helped me to decide on the HP!

Thanks again all.

Topper

I would like to point out that W7 has closed the gap on Macs significantly in my opinion.

In my opinion W7 has tried to copy some of the stuff that OS X does on the Mac and has made a pigs ear of it.

I have W7 running on my iMac through Parallels. I’ll admit that I haven’t spent a massive amount of time trying to get to grips with it. I’m sure W7 does have some benefits over previous versions but I am yet to find them.

In answer to the original question – get the Mac.

I’m sure W7 does have some benefits over previous versions but I am yet to find them.

Faster, better looking and “it just works” 😛 The new taskbar is really nice so long as you don’t try to use it as a dock as it just seems messy that way.

Faster, better looking and “it just works”

Agreed, much better than Vista and XP.

Still not a patch on the Mac OS X though. Spaces is a particular favourite feature.

I am a mac fanboi, but given the options you have presented and the use you want to make of it, I’d go with the HP.

Me too. I own a MacBook Pro, and generally won’t hear a word said against it.

But..

Parallels/Fusion is a non starter for any modern games.
BootCamp is not great when gaming either – the drivers struggle to ramp up the cooling, and even adding in bits like fan control add ons, the machine is unstable. I played Warhammer for some time under BootCamp and it was never good.. performance was also relatively poor. Warcraft native on mac is excellent, so it was a driver issue – but even tweaks like Catalyst drivers / Omega drivers etc. never really cut it. If you treat it as an emergency button, for windows apps it’s OK, but usually such apps will work in a VM anyway.. thus making dual boot a pain in the ass.

The Pavillion is cheaper and fits your criteria better. Unless you have a real need for the mac (your other uses can also be done quite pleasantly in Windows, but I do like iPhoto/iMovie because they work as I’d like them too) I’d buy that.

W7 is pretty good. I prefer OS X but I work with Win 7 / server 2008 R2 all day and don’t feel hard done by.

The Pavillion it is then!

Thanks all.

I’m sure W7 does have some benefits over previous versions but I am yet to find them.

.. is a direct consequence of …

I’ll admit that I haven’t spent a massive amount of time trying to get to grips with it.

So you can hardly blame Windows 🙂

It’s nicer and slicker than Vista, and a million years ahead of XP.

Interesting brassneck – not only are there difficulties with playing windows games on a Mac, but the OP would also have a slower CPU and GPU in the first place.