Seeking advice on Mac laptop for work + gaming

muckle

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Aug 25, 2010
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Hi. So a friend of mine needs to get a new iOS laptop (for his work - the Mac OS will be a requirement), but he will use it for gaming as well. If it is decent for gaming any work requirements should be satisfied.

I am a PC guy and the only Apple product I ever mess with is my iPhone. So what would like to learn is - what are his options?

Does he just need to pick out a prepackaged macbook pro? Or are their more custom options? I built my PC custom so I know that's how you get the most bang for your buck but does that extend to a Mac setup in any sense?

Like I said Apple laptops are completely foreign to me so any insight would be helpful.

Thanks
 
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First, I'll clarify a few things. Using Apple Bootcamp you can create a dual boot system that can boot natively into either Windows or OS X. You will to purchase Windows 7 in addition to your mac hardware (the Mac comes with OS X)... Hell you can even abandon OS X entirely and just run Windows on it (just FYI). Since most games aren't released for OS X this would be necessary for gaming but not really for anything else as everything else can be handled in OS X just as well if not better than Windows.

If gaming is important a 15" MBP is a minimum since that is the smallest and lowest class of Apple notebooks/laptops/ultrabooks etc. that has a discrete graphics The 13" Macbook Pros and all of the MacBook Airs simply use Intel integrated...

thently

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May 10, 2007
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There is nothing but pre packaged macs and none of them are "for gaming" they can play games but you can't even get all games mor mac platform... Although it has gotten better since Steam added Mac support. I see that it is a requirement to be OSX soo just get the one that is in the price range you can afford.. Macs with good video cards are just stupid expensive so good luck..

THent
 

Tibbs01

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Assuming a 15" the highest performance card they offer is the 6770m which would be good for medium settings in most games. Taxing games like BF3 etc. would be much lower. There are very few customization options, but you can see for yourself here: http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macbook_pro?aid=AIC-WWW-NAUS-K2-CONFIGURE-MACBOOKPRO-PERFORMANCE&cp=CONFIGURE-MACBOOKPRO

You can review more info about the 6770m here: http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-HD-6770M.43955.0.html

The biggest obstacle for gaming is that not many developers outside of Blizzard and Valve release their games for Mac OS, so he will need to be prepared to run a bootcamp partition.
 

MacPCiOSAndroidGuy

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Jul 31, 2011
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I agree with Rockdpm. Macs are over priced and you can get way more performance than ANY Pre-made Mac or PC for less. If you NEED OSX, for gaming I would dual-boot a Mac into Win 7 or Win XP Pro (to save disc space) and run Parallels. Get a 15.6" with at least 4gigs of RAM
 

geogolem

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Mar 8, 2012
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First, I'll clarify a few things. Using Apple Bootcamp you can create a dual boot system that can boot natively into either Windows or OS X. You will to purchase Windows 7 in addition to your mac hardware (the Mac comes with OS X)... Hell you can even abandon OS X entirely and just run Windows on it (just FYI). Since most games aren't released for OS X this would be necessary for gaming but not really for anything else as everything else can be handled in OS X just as well if not better than Windows.

If gaming is important a 15" MBP is a minimum since that is the smallest and lowest class of Apple notebooks/laptops/ultrabooks etc. that has a discrete graphics The 13" Macbook Pros and all of the MacBook Airs simply use Intel integrated graphics which is great for everything but gaming.

Having said all that, now is a horrible time to buy a new mac laptop. You should wait until the lineups are refreshed. Apple has also been rumored to be making drastic changes to their offerings, perhaps even somehow merging the Macbook Air and Macbook Pro lines.

I highly, highly recommend you wait until a new model is released. With Apple products its always best to buy right after a product line has been refreshed since you get alot more for your money. The worst time to buy is just before a product refresh because if you had waited a few weeks you would have gotten the updated model for the same price or cheaper.

www.macrumors.com is a pretty important site when talking about macs.

They have a buyers guide:
http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#MacBook_Pro
http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#MacBook_Air

As you can see, they reccomend not buying unless you absolutely need it today.


 
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