re: Gonna cave and get the wife a Macbook

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What does she currently use?

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shes got a 2012 macbook pro that is hitting a wall. time for an upgrade

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You better be writing this shite off at least.

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good idea but then id have to be taxed on the income as well...

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Stick some more ram and a SSD in there and it will last a few more years.

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I did this with my 2009 MacBook, and it still works well. The only thing that I really have a major issue with now is battery life. Sometimes the processor bottle necks, but that's mostly a problem when I have a ton of stuff open in Chrome.

Crucial has a ram picker based on your model MacBook.

Samsung SSD Pros work well, stay away from Evos though. Crucial has an SSD I think that plays well too.

Ram changeout is easy, the SSD install is a bit more in depth and there are step by step guides out there for it.

Just move all her important files to an external hard drive. OSX has a built in reset feature to start fresh.

If you have a time machine backup you can just use it to restore everything once you get the OS installed in the new SSD.

There are guides to do this where you make a USB boot stick with a new copy of OS X installed. LINK

I don't know if I would restore from a time machine backup though. Then you are just bring all the same crap to the drive.

A good spring cleaning getting all the important files to an external drive and starting fresh with fresh installs of the programs you need and wiping out the crap you don't need would be a better way to go if you want to speed things up.

I sort of know how that feels. The gf was set on getting a mac after I compiled research and demonstrated how a superior machine could be had for cheaper.

I when a week after getting it, the wireless Internet in her apartment complex went out and she had to use an ethernet connection (which the mac didn't have) or her data for any Internet access.

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Operating System: PC (Windows 7, Windows 8, or Windows 10) OR Mac (OS X 10.6.8 and higher)(Chromebook is currently not supported)
Internet connection: Strongly recommended (for updates and access to the Silhouette Design Store and required to upgrade to the Designer Edition version)
RAM: 1 GB of RAM (2 GB recommended)
Processor: 2 GHz (or faster) processor speed
Memory: 186 MB of memory for program (does not include additional memory recommended for additional download content, which average in size of 50KB, though size will of course vary from image to image)
USB Port: USB 1.1 Port (or higher)

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Unless you're buying used, I doubt you could find a laptop that doesn't meet these specs.

You could get her this:

HP 255 - $299 @ TD

Heck, I got this off of Woot for $699:

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OMEN by HP 15-AX03DX 15.6" Gaming Laptop, 15.6" Full-HD IPS Display, Intel Core i7-6700HQ Quad-Core 2.6GHz, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 4GB, 128GB SSD + 1TB HDD, 8GB DDR4, 802.11ac, Bluetooth, Win10H

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It depends on what she wants. Does she also want to be able to turn it into a tablet? A Macbook can't do that, but there are several varieties of Windows laptops out there that can. I got my wife a Lenovo Twist a couple of years ago, and that runs the current versions of Adobe Photoshop and the Creative Suite. Then she has a tablet and a laptop all in one, like the Dell XPS detachable series.

Anyway, I tell my friends, "If you want a Mac, go for it. Two things to remember though:
1.) You're paying a lot more for "pretty"
2.) Apple repairs are pricey because Apple limits who can work on them"

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I pay a lot more for Mac for my wife for one simple reason. I don't have to play IT for her as often as I did when she had a windows based machine. My time is more valuable than a few hundred extra. Having a Mac has stopped her from installing a bunch of garbage because it is incompatible with Macs

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To be fair, this is pretty awesome, but my wife doesn't need me to fix things all that often... I think I can count the number of instances on one hand. ;)

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The base MacBook has a 1.1 GHz processor, but I'm certain that it would be enough. This 2016 1.1 GHz Skylake MacBook single core score is higher than the 2012 Mac Pro 3.1 GHz.

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This is good to know. I am still using my late 2008 2.4ghz aluminum body macbook and will likely get a new one some time this year. This thing works well overall just have to keep it plugged in or it'll die within 2 minutes.


Where do you find the scores for these?

well bit the bullet

Refurbished 13.3-inch MacBook Air 2.2GHz Dual-core Intel Core i7 for $1447 needed the 512gb ssd which killed any chance of a deal

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Overview Originally released March 2015 13.3-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit glossy widescreen display with support for millions of colors 8GB of 1600MHz LPDDR3 onboard memory 512GB PCIe-based flash storage1 720p FaceTime HD Camera Intel HD Graphics 600

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