I have pretty much exactly that same MacBook that you are considering. A 200 MB, 7200 RPM HD I recently upgraded myself is the only difference. For the past year+ I've used it as my daily production/ work machine in concert with a 24" Dell monitor that is now several years old. The 24" external monitor (1920x1200) is the largest that this MacBook can support (but it can also extend the desktop to the inbuilt monitor simultaneously for a "normal" dual monitor setup). ...of course that requires the $20 mini-DVI adapter.
I run pretty much all the same apps that you listed. I used to use CS2 but I upgraded to CS3 as soon as I could. CS2 is a little sluggish on the Intel Macs, even compared to how it was on my old XP HP PC. You will definitely be "inspired" to upgrade to CS3 if you get an Intel MacBook. I also simultaneously run an Apache and MySQL dev server on the MacBook (installed via XAMMP) for locally developing PHP web apps, but those apps hardly take any resources at all for just local dev purposes I leave them "running" at all times (even though there aren;t really doing anything but using a little RAM) and notice no impact whatsoever. Overall, this MacBook is an absolutely fantastic machine that totally keeps up with just about anything I can throw at it day-to-day. It remains way more responsive that my old PC did almost no matter what else is going on in the background. I can encode an entire DVD movie to H.264 in the background while also working on (really working on) 56 MB Photoshop Layout Comps. The only time it was really "boggy" was when I was working on a ridiculously large Photoshop Document in CS3. The file's dimensions were 8-feet by 3-feet at 150 dpi (it was a large, detailed banner). When I applied resize or move operations in that file, the processing necessary to accomplish this (which often took several minutes) would seem to slow down the rest of the apps or cause the Finder to BeachBall for a couple minutes. But that was a ridiculously large file to be working on with a laptop that only has 2 GB of RAM. And it only crashed PhotoShop once during the couple days I had to work on that file. I eventually got everything done with it that I needed to, which is worth noting! My old XP PC with 3 GB of RAM would have croaked at even trying to open the file. I had installed XP with BootCamp almost a year ago and was running Parallels from the XP partition of the hard drive. At the time I only had the stock, 5400 RPM, 80GB hard disk in the MacBook and I think that may have affected performance a little since i could only safely afford about 20GB to be dedicated to the XP Boot Camp Partition. Parallels also seemed to use the lion's share of the 2GB of the MacBooks RAM and, while Parallels started up the Windows XP VM up quite fast, it seemed to take quite a while to shut it down again (beach balling for quite a while and bogging down the whole system for a few minutes). That was with Tiger and a much smaller, slower HD. I eventually uninstalled Parallels and XP from the MacBook because I felt it wasn't as practical to my workflow at the time as connecting to my real Windows machines over the LAN with VNC. I think the fact that I only had CS2 at the time may have also aggravated the situation. While running Parallels the machine just didn't seem quite as Snappy!™ I think that if the MacBook could be upgraded to have 4G of RAM (it only takes 2GB max), then it may have alleviated the performance hit Parallels caused entirely (no way to know for sure though). I just upgraded to Leopard (which overall, I feel is really great) and have been meaning to give the new version of Boot Camp, the newer, faster (7200 RPM) 200 GB hard drive and the new version of Parallels another try. This time I'll probably dedicate more partition space (at least 40GB) for the Boot Camp XP partition. The only other let-down is the fact that the video card is pretty much useless for any real 3D gaming in Windows. The video card poses no problems whatsoever for anything with my work in Photoshop or Illustrator (CS3), TextMate, "serious" Flash animations (viewing movies with lots of "particle effects" are no problem, (Flash inside Safari on OS X is fantastic performance-wise in general). Some complex screensavers will get a little choppy on the 24" screen. I don't really do much in the way of true video production other than simple crop-type editing in Quicktime and iMovie and encoding with the Flash Video Encoder and HandBrake and that's no problem at all. I understand that the newer MacBooks (recently released) do have more powerful graphics cards and a slightly faster FSB on the processor, but I'm not sure if that would have much impact on what I do. I haven't researched any benchmarks or anything to see what the new capabilities actually do for real-world performance. Overall this MacBook is a fantastic production machine and I highly recommend it. Since it's used, the newer models just came out, and it probably doesn't have Leopard on it yet (and presumably comes with no other software?), assuming it has no notable, physical flaws, then I probably wouldn't pay more than $1300 for it. If you are looking for something more powerful, then I would recommend a MacBook Pro. Less portable, but larger screens and can take more RAM! More RAM is almost always better (to a point, depending on what you use the machine for) when it comes to Mac OS. Good Luck! -THEO- On Nov 7, 2:24 pm, "Andy Matthews" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I know many of you on this list are Mac users and so I'm asking for help. > > I'm looking to upgrade my computer (new workstation, and two new monitors). > I'm budgeting about $1500 - $2000. A co-worker of mine said that a friend of > HIS is selling a Macbook. Since I know that's an Intel machine I was curious > so I asked about the specs. Can you guys tell me what you think this machine > is worth? > > It's a late-2006 Macbook. 2GHz Core 2 Duo with SuperDrive. He upgraded the > RAM to 2GB and the hard drive to 160GB. The model number is MA700LL/A > (Google says that this is a 13.3 inch screen). But, that series is generally > called the Late 2006 Macbook. It's the white 2GHz one from that series. He's > got all of the original packaging, accessories, disks, etc. > > More importantly, I'm needing a new machine to work on. My PC is nearing the > end of it's useful life and so I'm wanting something that kicks some hiney. > I need to run Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. on it. I also need to run code on > it. At the moment I only have CS2 and I've heard that CS2 is pretty slow on > Intel Macs. > > Finally, I need comparisons on this computer to a newer Dell workstation. I > prefer to have a desktop machine, but if I can get away with a laptop that > can run fast, can run Windows, and can be hooked up to a real monitor, then > a laptop is okay. > > Amazon has this price listed for the > machine:http://www.amazon.com/Apple-MacBook-MA700LL-Notebook-SuperDrive/dp/B0... > S > > ____________________________________ > > Andy Matthews > Senior ColdFusion Developer > > Office: 877.707.5467 x747 > Direct: 615.627.9747 > Fax: 615.467.6249 > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > <http://www.dealerskins.com/>www.dealerskins.com > > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| > Create robust enterprise, web RIAs. > Upgrade to ColdFusion 8 and integrate with Adobe > Flexhttp://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/flex2/?sdid=RVJP > > Archive:http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/message.cfm/messageid:292859 > Subscription:http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/subscribe.cfm > Unsubscribe:http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=26617.15064.4
