Macbook Pro 15" Replacement..

[MeowBuilder]

Hello! My macbook pro 15" 2012 mid model, just recently died on me. The logic board was fried, which the quote to repair it is way to expensive.

I need a replacement! I don't want to cheap out on a laptop. I need one for college work but also to be able to take anything I throw at it. Specifically I need i5 or i7! AMD is a no for me. Quad core must be as well!

I did take some time and looked at the Dell XPS line up. Anyone have any suggestions? Must be 8GB ram as well.

 

[Chicken-Select]

What's your budget? Also give us a little info on what you plan to do with it. Gaming? Content creation? Do you prefer smaller foot prints or do you not mind it being a little bulky.

 

[bliq]

I'm going to assume a Windows laptop is ok, otherwise, you will pretty much need to stick with another Mac.

There are some good deals on Black Friday if you can wait a week. The one i recommended for my mom was a skylake i7 dell inspiron 5000 15.6 for I believe $699. I think it will be at costco

http/www.bfads.net/Item/Costco-Black-Friday-Dell-Inspiron-156-Laptop-w-Intel-Core-i7-16GB-RAM-1TB-HDD-1080p-HD-Touchscreen-and-Windows-10/279190

 

[Knucklehead729]

if you are looking for windows i would get something on black friday, yes you have to wait a week, BUT, you get some pretty awesome deals.
In order for me to suggest something i would need your price range, and what you go to college for. if you are doing a lot of multi tasking you should get a laptop with at least an i5, or i7. also you have to consider if you are needing something with mainly performance (IE something you can throw anything at) you would want a laptop with a gpu (Graphics Processing Unit) which is for graphic design, coding, etc, etc.

I need to know the price you want to pay, and what you are going to use it for.

 

[MeowBuilder]

I'm good with both platforms. I don't need this ASAP, the holidays are coming up which is nice.

My maximum budget is $1,300. Mostly FB, youtube netflix, not major programs. The macbook pro was overkill, but it was present for the college. So I'd say MS office programs etc.

I'm going to college for Networking technology. If I'm spending under 600$ I want to get the best for the buck and to last me a long time... so reliabilty is very important.

 

[bliq]

so what you really need is something that runs some sort of *nix kernel as those make it easier to do most things technical due to its native terminal. the mac was a good choice. personally, I'd stick with that if you can really swing 1300- they're pretty well built and future OS upgrades ought to be free. maybe a macbook air i5? you really don't need a ton of processor to do networking or coding even. Maybe if you were doing game design or something video processing intensive. all you really need a native terminal app (although putty is pretty good for windows, I just dont want to deal with it). So I'd research some laptops that either come with linux or are well supported under linux, buy a cheapish one of those, and immediately install linux on it and go from there.

 

[bliq]

you could also just buy a cheap windows laptop and run a linux VM on it. As a tech professional, this is how I do almost all of my work. This means I can mess up my environment, throw it away, and stand up a new one in just a few minutes.

 

[MeowBuilder]

you could also just buy a cheap windows laptop and run a linux VM on it. As a tech professional, this is how I do almost all of my work. This means I can mess up my environment, throw it away, and stand up a new one in just a few minutes.

Thanks for the idea as well. Just in general, do you recommend I purchase a laptop under 600$ and try to find a i5 quad core (if possible) and then just do 8GB ram or higher and SSD upgrades, instead of paying top tier for laptops over 1k?

 

[bliq]

For what you're doing, yes absolutely. anything over about $600-700 is pretty much only needed for gaming. I've seen i7-5500 based laptops with 8GB of RAM for less than $500. For me, I'd just open it up and install a 256GB or 512GB SSD and take the HDD and put it in a USB3 chassis for warm storage. not sure if that's something you'd want to do, but 256/512GB SSDs are generally not standard equipment until you reach higher price points than necessary- it works out to something like getting the external HDD for free sometimes. However, i wouldnt want to even use computers without SSD's these days for good reason.