Subscribe now and choose from over 30 free gifts worth up to £49 - Plus get £25 to spend in our shop
Hi there,
My work has been able to get funding for a new laptop for me. I have around £1000-£1100 to work with and wondered if anybody has any suggestions? It will mainly be used for coding and producing graphs in Matlab and similar along with making documents and spreadsheets. I also need to run a Virtual machine.
It must be fairly light/ portable for travelling with. I do like Mac's and can get a MacBook Pro with 8Gb of RAM and an i7 processor for £1000 which actually seems quite good.
Any advice would be much appreciated!
Cheers,
Rob
Are there no computer experts here today? 🙂
Do you need a 'high performance' device for Matlab? Doesn't seem like it would be particularly resource-hungry. It's fair enough if you just want to spend the money, but I suspect you'll get suitable performance for half your budget.
Hi Three_Fish, thanks for the reply 🙂
A lot of the stuff I do is least squares fitting of functions with many parameters so quite CPU intensive. Also do some Monte Carlo simulations so I guess the faster the better! Always associate Macs with being expensive but this seems quite a good deal for what it is. Am I missing something?
The gap in price has closed a lot in recent years. A high performance laptop will cost about the same, if not more than a macbook pro.
I was always anti-mac for many years mainly because of the ridiculous frothing at the mouth from macboi's when the subject came up. Eventually I bought a macbook pro despite that.
They're very well put together physically and the software works well but they're just another computer. They still go wrong and have problems so don't expect perfection. Battery life is quite good, fires up reasonably quickly, screen is nice.
That said, I'd recommend one. I like mine. Assuming it works with matalab then that's what I'd go for.
One of the main attractions for Macs for me is the build quality, something you'll want if you're travelling a lot. I've got a 2008 MacBook still going strong for my on the move needs, although it's nowhere near powerful enough for my main machine anymore.
The new retina macbook pros look rather nice, although it's worth bearing in mind they use proprietary memory, so you won't be able to upgrade it yourself in the future.
I needed a laptop for work with a decent amount of power, and finally settled on an MSI CX61.
Very happy with it so far. Was tempted by a macbook (they're lovely) but the majority of my work is done on windows - I could have run VMware on the Mac, or spent a lot less and got something just as powerful, and with a lot more capacity.
Sony Vaio.
Thanks a lot for the good advice everyone 🙂