^^LOL

I have a coworker who has a Macbook air. He can't take it outside for more than half an hour without it being plugged in because it'll die.

 

well played, i lol'd. although if i had a sister, i'd probably be more offended.

 

Wow thanks for the heads up guys. Its good to hear from people who have first hand experience with the air and its flaws. I think I'm going to take Matt's advice and go with a standard macbook.

So the education discount seems to be my best option at this point?

 

Hey Norcal, every time I get out of class I hear your open Midpipe STi driving through downtown!

Like everyone said, the Air is pretty much looks, it has great size and it's light, but when it comes to using it as a real laptop, it just doesn't cut it. The Macbook or Macbook Pro are a lot better.

You could search on eBay and then try to get the 8% cashback through Bing to save you a bit. Just check around where is the cheapest, but usually eBay with Bing is a little lower than other places. GL

 

For a new one, yes. Apple also has refurbished ones on their site, but the education discount doesn't apply to those, but they do come with a warranty (unlike used via private sale).

 

I have a white Intel C2D MacBook from summer 2008 and it is a great machine, not heavy or clunky, pretty much perfect size (the only thing I would replace it with would be a 13" MacBook Pro).

Do you use firewire? I'm not sure if the standard MacBooks come with firewire anymore so keep that in mind.

 

That it does not. However, being a business student I'm not sure that he'd really be using anything besides and external hard drive on a firewire port, and a HDD should have a USB port too.

 

Also, don't buy RAM from Apple. Buy it from a Mac vendor and save yourself a few hundred dollars!

Here is a good place to buy RAM

http://www.macsales.com/

 

Or http://www.crucial.com/mac/index.aspx (much better quality than Crucial Racing )

 

Yeah, my camcorder is firewire so that feature is a must for me. Most other people probably don't even know what firewire is! But yeah, USB 2.0 works fine for external drives - I just bought a 500gb external drive for backup to use with Time Machine and it is USB 2.0, works great.

 

And while I'm on the subject of Mac stuff - the new 10.6 Snow Leopard OS is FAST! If you are reading this and have an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, I HIGHLY recommend Snow Leopard. I swear I got a 5-10% bump in speed at least. Graphics are a bit better too.

 

that or theft. not that I condone theft

 

My friend just bought some corsair ram and tossed it in behind the battery. Saved a few hundred bucks =D

 

I'll trade my macbook with 4gb of upgraded ram for car parts!!

 

unless you're getting the MBA with the SSD its going to be sooooo slooooow! I used one with the standard 4200RPM disk and it sucked after data gets fragmented.

Get a refurbished macbook. http://store.apple.com/us/product/FC...co=MTU5MzE0Mzc
$850