cheap Macs?
Oct. 15th, 2006 09:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cellioDear LJ brain trust,
I'd like to get an inexpensive laptop. It won't be my main machine; it's for travel and other situations where portability is useful. So it doesn't need to be studly; it just needs to be reliable and support basic tools like Firefox, emacs, SSH, FTP, and that sort of thing.
This would be a prime opportunity to explore the Macintosh, which some of my friends rave about, except for one little thing: I can get a (new) Dell laptop for around $400, but Macs start at $1100. Is there some less-expensive option I'm missing?
I'd like to get an inexpensive laptop. It won't be my main machine; it's for travel and other situations where portability is useful. So it doesn't need to be studly; it just needs to be reliable and support basic tools like Firefox, emacs, SSH, FTP, and that sort of thing.
This would be a prime opportunity to explore the Macintosh, which some of my friends rave about, except for one little thing: I can get a (new) Dell laptop for around $400, but Macs start at $1100. Is there some less-expensive option I'm missing?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-16 03:14 am (UTC)On the other hand, I actually bought that $400 Dell laptop for Jill, because she needed a Windows machine, and frankly it's less than delightful. So if you decide against a Mac, you might want to shell out a little more than the bare minimum for your Windows machine. (Then again, I could be biased by my intense dislike of installing stupid Windows patches every 10 minutes. Since you mostly want to run free software, I guess you could just put Linux on it and maybe it would be better.)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-16 04:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-16 09:11 am (UTC)Tangentially ...
Date: 2006-10-16 05:04 pm (UTC)I've been planning to upgrade my various Linux machines to something more modern than RH6. I think the most RAM I have in any one machine is only 320M and most have less than 96M. Please tell me most modern distros don't ask for as much RAM as Ubuntu...
(If it helps, most of my machines don't run X servers, though a couple of them do run X clients.)
Re: Tangentially ...
Date: 2006-10-16 05:23 pm (UTC)If you're running XFCE desktop and FireFox and a bunch of xterms, and you fire up OpenOffice and GIMP and such when you need them, you can manage on 256MB.
If you're running no X, you may be fine on 128MB. Ubuntu's memory requirements are solely a function of the desktop orientation.
ubuntu
Date: 2006-10-16 06:32 pm (UTC)As for Apple laptops, there's an important rule: never pay retail. The employee and academic discounts can be substantial. You know plenty of people who can get you one or the other.
Re: ubuntu
Date: 2006-10-20 03:32 pm (UTC)The employee and academic discounts can be substantial.
While this was true historically, in recent years the academic discounts have gotten a lot smaller. I think now they're on the order of 10%. While it's not nothing, it's not like the academic discounts back in the day...
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-16 02:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-16 05:24 pm (UTC)