I bought a Latitude through Dell Small Business. The machines are better put together than the Dell Home machines, and I think they come with less random junk installed. Also, I'm told that the Small Business support division is better.
In my case, though, the first thing I plan to do is shrink the windows partition down to 10 GB or so and put Linux on it.
I think Macs are really good machines. They tend to have a high It Just Works factor. I'm jumping back to Linux for a variety of reasons, some of which are admittedly political in nature (in my heart, I'm a big open technology partisan), but I'd still recommend the Mac+AppleCare combo to a lot of people who were laptop shopping.
I was thinking he should get a Mac mini. At 600 list plus the educational discount, that wouldn't be bad...if it would work with one of his current monitors.
Yeah, that's what the Mac mini is designed for. Switchers who already have a setup and just want to swap out. They're definitely not bad computers.
Again, though, the Apple premium price is more apparent with the mini. You're paying a lot for "Apple" and "small". An essentially equivalent, but much larger, Dell can be had for under $400 (without edu discount). But the Dell won't run Os X.
I'm a little torn on whether or not to get AppleCare with the minis. You need it less, but it's also a lot cheaper. And it is pretty expensive to get Apple to fix anything if you don't have the extended warranty.
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In my case, though, the first thing I plan to do is shrink the windows partition down to 10 GB or so and put Linux on it.
I think Macs are really good machines. They tend to have a high It Just Works factor. I'm jumping back to Linux for a variety of reasons, some of which are admittedly political in nature (in my heart, I'm a big open technology partisan), but I'd still recommend the Mac+AppleCare combo to a lot of people who were laptop shopping.
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Again, though, the Apple premium price is more apparent with the mini. You're paying a lot for "Apple" and "small". An essentially equivalent, but much larger, Dell can be had for under $400 (without edu discount). But the Dell won't run Os X.
I'm a little torn on whether or not to get AppleCare with the minis. You need it less, but it's also a lot cheaper. And it is pretty expensive to get Apple to fix anything if you don't have the extended warranty.
Reply
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