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So I asked a friend of mine who's heavy into laptops what I should get my daughter for school (she's 9) since her PC has been crapping out of late and Dell has these awesome deals on basic Laptops. Hell,I've been thinking about grabbing one for me so I have internet when I travel or am not at home. I'm thinking laptop for her as opposed to PC for space saving issues and portability.

She immediately and enthusiastically suggested a Mac Laptop. For example she listed how Word can work with a Mac to assuage my compatability fears.

I was very skeptical. No windows based stuff in a microsoft dominated world? I've never ever used a Mac since the first Apples in '85.

Bearing in mind my daughter is 9, in grade school, her only prior experiences have been with PC's, her work will consist mostly of research, book reports and some very basic gaming what reasons can you list for me that would point to a Mac as a viable option for her home school use?

The price alone for me is a turnoff $1000 as opposed to a $549 Dell basic model.

Help out an absolute Mac ignorant person.

I've been considering getting a Macbook Pro myself, but their prices are pretty steep compared to your general PC notebooks. (I've mainly been interested because of the fact that you can now get Bootcamp and install Windows XP to dual boot on them as well). I'm not sure I'd be very eager to recommend any Mac notebook for a 9 year old though. . .especially if said 9 year old is prone to forgetting things or otherwise losing stuff, and if price is a big concern.

I have to jump on this bandwagon thread, I too am considering buying a new laptop, and I really, really, really wanting a MacBook.

The last Mac I had was - actually my first computer - an Apple Macintosh Classic II. I loved it to bits, but couldn't find anyone else that had it, and I eventually had to get a Windows '95 PC (and thus I made my first venture into the world of Blue Screen of Death).

But now, I think I'm ready to go back to my routes. The only thing I can think of that I use my laptop for that I have to ask; 'would it work on a MacBook?' is WoW ... yes, I know playing on a 13" screen would be stupid, but I don't really think I could go for the pro.

Oh, WoW and all the porn .avi files also!



So .... should I or shouldn't I?

P.S. Also, can I still get 'Dark Castle (I & II) and LoadRunner to work on a new MacBook, because those games were the BOMB!

Macs in the pure budget sector don't exist, out of Apple's decision. If you're looking for something totally cheap, I don't think Apple is the best choice. However, go to an apple store and try them out, the Apple store I went into in San Francisco let people try them out with no restrictions.

Stravo wrote:So I asked a friend of mine who's heavy into laptops what I should get my daughter for school (she's 9) since her PC has been crapping out of late and Dell has these awesome deals on basic Laptops. Hell,I've been thinking about grabbing one for me so I have internet when I travel or am not at home. I'm thinking laptop for her as opposed to PC for space saving issues and portability.

She immediately and enthusiastically suggested a Mac Laptop. For example she listed how Word can work with a Mac to assuage my compatability fears.

I was very skeptical. No windows based stuff in a microsoft dominated world? I've never ever used a Mac since the first Apples in '85.

Bearing in mind my daughter is 9, in grade school, her only prior experiences have been with PC's, her work will consist mostly of research, book reports and some very basic gaming what reasons can you list for me that would point to a Mac as a viable option for her home school use?

The price alone for me is a turnoff $1000 as opposed to a $549 Dell basic model.

Help out an absolute Mac ignorant person.

Really, the MacBook's pricing is extremely competitive; they just start higher. A $1299 MacBook usually will get you equal to or better hardware than a $1299 Dell if you match stuff like size and weight class.

But yeah, I completely understand wanting to get the cheapest machine possible for your daughter. Unfortunately, Apple doesn't cater to the ultra-budget crowd.

Yes, Microsoft Office for Mac is available; same pricing as on Windows. Obviously, buy the Student and Teacher edition. It's the same product just half the price.

Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook (called Entourage on Mac).

Bearing in mind my daughter is 9, in grade school, her only prior experiences have been with PC's, her work will consist mostly of research, book reports and some very basic gaming what reasons can you list for me that would point to a Mac as a viable option for her home school use?

Research will be identical. FireFox for Mac is indentical to FireFox for Windows or Linux.

Book reports will be identical; you're still working on Word.

Maintainence will be reduced; there are ZERO Mac viruses, so you don't have to worry about your daughter accidentally downloading one.

The hardware is generally better, at least compared to those cheaper notebooks; it's going to be much thinner and lighter than that $549 PC, and have a much better battery life. Built in camera, 802.11n, etc.

Basically, the advantages will be hardware and a complete lack of viruses. No messing with antivirus and firewall software, no worrying about securities. Additionally, since most of the creative crowd uses Macs, she'll have that available if she ever goes in that direction in the future (the local high school here has a lab full of iMacs and MacBooks). iPhoto'll make it a lot easier for her to deal with organizing huge photo libraries if you ever buy her a digital camera, and EVERY kid loves GarageBand (music creation app, works very well).

Honestly, though, we're talking about a computer used for simply homework. Microsoft Word works the same way no matter what platform you're on. The only difference is you're not worrying about viruses, and you're on sleeker hardware.


If she turns in presentations, she'll obviously want to do them in PowerPoint; but if she's actually ever doing a presentation, I've been told by many people that presenting a presentation in Keynote usually is a guaranteed A+, because a Keynote presentation has all kinds of high-quality 3D transitions and effects and high-resolution images and simply makes PowerPoints look extremely bad.

Yes, it is a Windows-dominated world; but the only thing Windows can run that others can't are Windows executables. Everything on the internet works fine, all document formats work fine (PDF, Word, Excel, etc, etc).


If you want a cheap throwaway machine, the $549 PC might be a better bet. The MacBook'll last a lot longer though. Let me second Ace Pace's "go in to an Apple Store and try one out" suggestion. CompUSA's work too.

To Crown:
I haven't run WoW, but I've been told it runs great. I actually game under Boot Camp quite a bit, and the 13" screen isn't a disadvantage; I actually usually win. The 13" screen is fairly high resolution (1280x800) for its size, so if you have good eyesight you can see very well; I'm a near-perfect sniper on my MB, without needing to zoom in.

Actually, Blizzard one of the only companies that includes the Mac and PC version of the game on the same disk, so your current WoW CD will install fine on a Mac.

If you want to play OS 9 games, you can even do that on Windows. Or on a Mac. Both via an emulator.
http://uneasysilence.com/archive/2006/08/7352/

Unfortunately, it can't be done natively. Apple changed operating systems (remember Mac OS 9 -> Mac OS X involved a switch to UNIX) *and* changed processor architecture. PowerPC OS X can run OS 9 apps via a compatability mode, and Intel OS X can run PowerPC OS X apps via a behind-the-scenes emulator called Rosetta, but Intel OS X can't run OS 9 apps because Apple didn't try combining the compatability mode AND emulator to run 8-year-old-applications.

One last side note; I love Handbrake. A simple app where I can pop in a copy-protected DVD, choose a bitrate or any settings I want (or skip all that) and press one button and rip it straight to MPEG-4 with chapter markers and subtitles intact and it'll play on my iPod, on an AppleTV, on a PSP or a 360? And it takes 30 minutes to rip and convert a 2 hour long movie?

You could get an iBook on eBay, like I did. Of course, I turned out not to care for it and gave it away to a relative.

Do it Strav. Dual-boot or use Parallels for the first few weeks for the apps you can't replace, and you'll find yourself using the terrible OS partition less and less as time goes by.

Personally, I think you're better off getting something cheap, so you won't have to worry about getting all pissed off if she breaks it. You're not buying it for yourself, you're buying it for a 9 year old kid. For all you know, she'll drop it down a staircase.

Darth Wong wrote:Personally, I think you're better off getting something cheap, so you won't have to worry about getting all pissed off if she breaks it. You're not buying it for yourself, you're buying it for a 9 year old kid. For all you know, she'll drop it down a staircase.

There's also the increased risk of theft. A 9 year old with an expensive laptop might look like an appealing target to the wrong people.

General Zod wrote:

Darth Wong wrote:Personally, I think you're better off getting something cheap, so you won't have to worry about getting all pissed off if she breaks it. You're not buying it for yourself, you're buying it for a 9 year old kid. For all you know, she'll drop it down a staircase.

There's also the increased risk of theft. A 9 year old with an expensive laptop might look like an appealing target to the wrong people.

She's not leaving the house with that sucker unless its under adult supervision though I can see her carrying it over to her friend's house for a sleepover.

Still, like Mike, I am inclined for cheapness right now, even though she takes care of her ipod she ruined the cartiridge port for her DS she only just got this Christmas.

My buddy in tech support also chimed in support for the Mac option. I think I will stop by a Mac store this weekend and give it a whirl and see how it looks and feels.

Stravo wrote:
She's not leaving the house with that sucker unless its under adult supervision though I can see her carrying it over to her friend's house for a sleepover.

If it's not going to be bought for the portability aspect, then why not get a Mac Mini? For Macs they're relatively cheap, and with an upgrade in ram to about 1gb (512mb is rather skimpy) you could have a decent Mac machine for around $700 or so.

General Zod wrote:

Stravo wrote:
She's not leaving the house with that sucker unless its under adult supervision though I can see her carrying it over to her friend's house for a sleepover.

If it's not going to be bought for the portability aspect, then why not get a Mac Mini? For Macs they're relatively cheap, and with an upgrade in ram to about 1gb (512mb is rather skimpy) you could have a decent Mac machine for around $700 or so.

Doesn't that assume that she has to move a screen around or at least borrow one?

Buying an expensive, breakable, anything for a 9 year old is just asking for trouble.

I'd suggest you buy your daughter a used ThinkPad. You get a durable machine that will be rather difficult to break for probably around $200-$300. Do a fresh install of Windows, or better yet, Linux (and with the latter, as an added plus, you won't have to worry about her filling it up with malware).

RThurmont wrote:I'd suggest you buy your daughter a used ThinkPad. You get a durable machine that will be rather difficult to break for probably around $200-$300. Do a fresh install of Windows, or better yet, Linux (and with the latter, as an added plus, you won't have to worry about her filling it up with malware).

I've seen a bunch of cheaply priced Thinkpads on Craigslist with decent specs (P4s) for about $500. Since Stravo's in NYC (I think?) he should have no trouble finding people on the New York Craigslist site.

I love macs, I recommend them to everyone, how ever I fear a laptop may not be the right fit for a 9 year old. Your kid may be some what responsible (she's only 9, i'm not expecting adult behaviour from her), but she's still a kid and accidents tend to happen around kids. Spills, drops, bumps. I find MacBooks are a little more fragile then their predecessor the iBook.

I strongly suggest you give her a cheap (<$200) second hand laptop and see what happens. If it's still intact and working after 6 months and extra capability is actually necessary you can consider getting her a decent one. But even a five year old laptop will play DVDs, browse the web and run Office 2000 ok, and what more does a 9 year old really need?

This is one (rare) place where a tablet PC may actually make sense, if you could get one rugged and cheap enough (unlikely, sadly).

As for Apple laptops, I'm recommending one to my mother at present.

Eh, I've had poor experiences w/ 2nd hand laptops- my T22 I've gotten for 250$ has cracks all over the place, and now the AC adapter had died- a slightly older Tecra has also died, as well as a Latitude CPi. I do tend to be rough on equipment, but aside from the damage from droppng the thinkpad (which still worked, aside from flaky memory), the other damage came from accumulated wear/tear (hairline cracks growing, etc). That said, those were fairly ancient laptops being the greater part of a decade old....

Praxis wrote: Yes, Microsoft Office for Mac is available; same pricing as on Windows. Obviously, buy the Student and Teacher edition. It's the same product just half the price.

Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook (called Entourage on Mac).

Entourage is NOT Outlook, it's not even CLOSE to Outlook and probably never will be.

And I don't use Office on a Mac because it's ass slow due to the fact that there isn't a native binary (you need to run it through an emulator). It's also unstable as all hell on an Intel Mac. This should be fixed come winter, but for now Office 2004 on an Intel Mac doesn't add much value.

InnocentBystander wrote:Buying an expensive, breakable, anything for a 9 year old is just asking for trouble.

I'm going to second this.

It might be worth it just to buy the cheapest PC laptop available. The Mac Mini idea was also good.

The Kernel wrote:

Praxis wrote: Yes, Microsoft Office for Mac is available; same pricing as on Windows. Obviously, buy the Student and Teacher edition. It's the same product just half the price.

Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook (called Entourage on Mac).

Entourage is NOT Outlook, it's not even CLOSE to Outlook and probably never will be.

And I don't use Office on a Mac because it's ass slow due to the fact that there isn't a native binary (you need to run it through an emulator). It's also unstable as all hell on an Intel Mac. This should be fixed come winter, but for now Office 2004 on an Intel Mac doesn't add much value.

Agreed (except I have hardly used Entourage so have no idea the differences). But it works seamlessly to the user; they click Word, Word opens. It's just slow.

As far as compatability, having Word is critical. But Office 2008 with a UB will be a HUGE improvement.

Frankly Microsoft's policy of forcing users to pay for the upgrade is near-criminal. It's not much more work than a recompile. This is not a hate-Microsoft statement; I'm equally irritated by Adobe's policy. The majority of OS X developers released free Universal updates to their apps.

Praxis wrote: Agreed (except I have hardly used Entourage so have no idea the differences). But it works seamlessly to the user; they click Word, Word opens. It's just slow.

Entourage looks a lot like Outlook but it does not properly work with an Exchange server at all. In other words, it is nothing more than a dressed up version of every other non-Outlook client out there and is thoroughly useless for business purposes.

If you don't rely on an Exchange server for your productivity then I doubt you would care, but if you run a Mac in a corporate infrastructure then it is a very large issue. I personally only use Parallels on my work Mac because I want to use Office 2007.

As far as compatability, having Word is critical.

Too bad file compatibility with Windows Word sucks ass. I've created documents in Word 2004 that are consistently missing images when you try to open them on Word 2003/2007. Big problem.

Hopefully this is fixed in Office 2008 with the introduction of XML-Office files.

But Office 2008 with a UB will be a HUGE improvement.

Frankly Microsoft's policy of forcing users to pay for the upgrade is near-criminal. It's not much more work than a recompile. This is not a hate-Microsoft statement; I'm equally irritated by Adobe's policy. The majority of OS X developers released free Universal updates to their apps.

Actually, for Adobe and Microsoft it is probably MUCH more than a recompile. Both suites are not only complicated, but they are highly customized (Adobe has it's own memory manager for example) and need to be heavily rewritten to be UBs.

Screw Apple and get a Dell.

All kidding aside, my experiences with Dell's warranty service and repair have almost all been positive.
The sole exception was when the dumbass that worked for the contract service company that did Dell's 'at home' calls in my area bent some pins in the socket on the laptop motherboard that the Bluetooth module plugged into.
He did this because he inserted it backwards and forced it in with pliers when it didn't plug right up.
Needless to say, he spend about 30 minutes straightening the pins up with a set of picks to fix it.
If he hadn't been able to fix that, he said that they'd have to replace the motherboard at their expense, not Dell's.

Other than that one semi-negative, Dell's been Johnny-on-the-spot WRT warranty hardware repair and parts replacement.
In fact, when my old 9300 developed a solid line of stuck pixels about 6 months after the warranty expired, Dell replaced it out of warranty after I emailed their 'consumer advocate' about the problem.
It turned out that a lot of their machines made at the same time as mine used a batch of LG/Philps panels that developed the stuck pixel problem, so Dell started replacing them out of warranty.

As far as my latest one goes, I bought a refurbished bottom of the line Latitude (their business line) from their outlet store for about $800 with a 3 year warranty.
Since it was a bottom of the line machine, the screen wasn't the best as it had very uneven brightness from top to bottom.
I emailed Dell about it and they offered to replace it instead of just sending a tech out, since I was within the 21 day return period.

I said OK, and the machine I got to replace this bottom of the line Latitude was a tricked out top of the line D820 that would have cost over $1500.
I called them and they said it was no mistake, and they did it because they didn't have any more of the bottom end latitudes in stock and sent me what they had as a replacement, and did I find it acceptable?

If you're buying for a 9 year old, I'd get the best deal I could find on a latitude (check out their outlet store to see if you can get a good deal on a refurb), order it with XP instead of Vista*, and get the 'complete care' accidental damage warranty.
That way, it it does take a trip down the stairs, Dell will repair or replace it.



*I got the Vista 'Express Upgrade' with my Dell and after running it for 2 days, went back to XP because of immature Vista hardware drivers for the laptop itself and nonexistent Vista drivers for some of my accessories like my photo printer.
If you get a machine with Vista Business preinstalled, you can legally 'roll back' to XP Pro. So if you decide Vista Business isn't for you, PM me and I'll make you a copy of my SLP Dell XP Pro disc.

The Kernel wrote:

Praxis wrote: Agreed (except I have hardly used Entourage so have no idea the differences). But it works seamlessly to the user; they click Word, Word opens. It's just slow.

Entourage looks a lot like Outlook but it does not properly work with an Exchange server at all. In other words, it is nothing more than a dressed up version of every other non-Outlook client out there and is thoroughly useless for business purposes.

If you don't rely on an Exchange server for your productivity then I doubt you would care, but if you run a Mac in a corporate infrastructure then it is a very large issue. I personally only use Parallels on my work Mac because I want to use Office 2007.

Huh, I've never tried connecting to the Exchange server from my Mac; I just used Web Access out of laziness.

Microsoft claims otherwise, though. They say Entourage 2004 supports Exchange email, shared calendaring, delegation, and directory access.
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/support.aspx?pid=exchange

The Kernel wrote:And I don't use Office on a Mac because it's ass slow due to the fact that there isn't a native binary (you need to run it through an emulator). It's also unstable as all hell on an Intel Mac. This should be fixed come winter, but for now Office 2004 on an Intel Mac doesn't add much value.

Really? Everyone I know who uses Macs for work has Office, and it seems to work fine for them? I'd be getting phonecalls all the time if it was crashing and losing work.

While I hear that Dell laptops are much better than Dell desktops, they can still fuck off. UNLESS YOU INSTALL LINUX ON IT LOL?