by "ImmoralMinority" (araimondo)
Published 11/02/2017 at 19:30
by "ImmoralMinority" (araimondo)
Published 11/02/2017 at 19:30
No Tags
STARS: 1
HP ProBook 650
My IT vendor can put this together with a 3 year accidental damage warranty. With a built in DVD-RW - about $1800. But when I read stuff like this, I kind of want the Mac, even though there is an Apple markup.
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What would you choose?
"Chariotoflove" (chariotoflove)
11/02/2017 at 19:35, STARS: 1
Mac all day, every day.
"CaptDale - is secretly British" (captdale)
11/02/2017 at 19:36, STARS: 2
Mac
"E90M3" (e90m3)
11/02/2017 at 19:39, STARS: 2
I will say, my 9 year old Macbook pro still works just fine.
"Phyrxes once again has a wagon!" (phyrxes)
11/02/2017 at 19:40, STARS: 1
While I am not a Mac person many of my students are deep in the apple ecosystem and have some variety of mac book. Their comments are a mixed bag about keyboard feel and the usefulness of the touch bar. The rest of my students are often serious android users and are running some version of a razor/msi/asus ultrabook. Very rarely do I see a iphone using student with a PC but its usually due to them playing computer games and they have an iphone since the whole family has them.
"Jarrett - [BRZ Boi]" (jarrettw)
11/02/2017 at 19:43, STARS: 0
Desktop.
In all seriousness though, and someone who has Steam installed, I wouldn’t touch a Mac.
"BrianGriffin thinks “reliable” is just a state of mind" (briangriffinsprius)
11/02/2017 at 19:46, STARS: 1
Get Refurb. This is similar to my government computer, which works fine. Nothing special, just fine. $1800 seems steep.
"lone_liberal" (token-liberal)
11/02/2017 at 19:47, STARS: 1
Personally, I’d go with that HP if given a choice between that and a Mac. The Macs are just too damn expensive for what they are and they frustrate the crap out of me every time I have to work on one. But I’m an IT person who works in a Microsoft environment so take that for what it’s worth.
"TheTurbochargedSquirrel" (thatsquirrel)
11/02/2017 at 19:54, STARS: 3
That HP seems like a horrible deal at $1800. Spending that much for a design that looks like it’s 10 years old and you only get an i5?
I highly recommend the XPS 15 in the $1,400 configuration. I have the older 9550 with the 6th generation i7 and I love it. Same power as the Macbook, Small footprint design that puts it around the same size as a 14" laptop, 10+ hour real world battery life, actual ports to go with your thunderbolt 3, and upgradeable SSD and RAM unlike the Mac. At $1,400 for a proper 45w Quad-core i7, GTX1050 graphics, 16GB ram, 512GB PCI-E SSD, 97Whr battery, and a really nice 1080p display it’s way more value for money than the Mac. For $400 more you can upgrade to a 4k touchscreen which is one of the nicest laptop screens I have ever seen. For $200 more you can even go to a 1TB PCI-E SSD. For $1,999 you are getting a machine that matches the $2,999 Macbook pro configuration spec for spec.
"Textured Soy Protein" (texturedsoyprotein)
11/02/2017 at 20:03, STARS: 1
Why don’t you go cheap with something like this ? Probably has everything you need. Do you need an optical drive?
"Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing." (granfury)
11/02/2017 at 20:05, STARS: 2
It really depends on the apps that you’re going to use. Not surprisingly, I’ve found that Microsoft office just seems to work a bit better and have more features on Windows than it does on the Mac. That being said, I feel more comfortable and productive when using a Mac even though I have decades of experience with both platforms, both personally and professionally. The fact that most fellow IT professionals I know use Macs when not at work says a lot to me. I found this out first-hand after I got my first IT job. I used to be just a computer hobbyist and looked forward to the technical challenges of repairing malfunctioning machines after I got off work. But once I joined the industry, the last thing I wanted to do after spending the day fixing broken computers was t to come home to more broken computers, and that’s when I made the switch.
One nice feature of a Mac is that you can easily run Windows on it, whereas running OS X on a PC is a bit more of a challenge (and not officially supported). My 2008 MacBook Pro still soldiers on to this day, and makes a pretty decent Windows 7 machine as well. Sure, there is a bit of a markup on Apple products when compared to a cheap PC, but as you’re finding out, the price of a comparable PC isn’t that much different than a Mac. Sure, Apple has made a few duds, but overall I think you’ll find their computers to be solid and trouble-free for an extended period as well as holding their value quite well.
My primary computer right now is an HP Elite 8300 workstation running both Windows 10 and OS X. I am writing this post on that machine whilst in Windows, and I only booted into Windows to fix something stupid that happened when I installed the latest OS update. I’d rather be on the Mac side, but I gotta get Windows working right again or it’s going to nag at me until I break down and do it...
"OpposResidentLexusGuy - USE20, XF20, XU30 and Press Cars" (jakeauern)
11/02/2017 at 20:08, STARS: 2
Just get a Mac and be happy. It just works. I loved the feature on my Samsung but it never just worked like my iPhone does. I have an Asus yet I use my wifes 4 year + old mac that feels like new.
"atfsgeoff" (atfsgeoff)
11/02/2017 at 20:19, STARS: 1
Just had an HP ProBook 650 come into my repair shop a few weeks ago. Half of the keys on the keyboard didn’t work. I replaced with a new keyboard, same problem. Not software, did the same thing on a linux boot disk. Customer only had it for 6 months and barely used it. He had to send it back to HP and, last I heard, has been without a laptop now for 2 weeks.
"Wacko" (wacko--)
11/02/2017 at 20:38, STARS: 0
http://store.hp.com/us/en/mdp/laptops/probook-650#!&tab=vao
Which one?
"DucST3-Red-1Liter-Standing-By" (ducst3-red-1liter-standing-by)
11/02/2017 at 20:58, STARS: 1
Thinkpad, the x240 is a great machine, or the x1 carbon
"itschrome" (itschrome)
11/02/2017 at 21:34, STARS: 1
Dunno about the 650, I daily an 850 and love the shit out of it.
"404 - User No Longer Available" (toni-cipriani)
11/02/2017 at 22:00, STARS: 1
Probooks aren’t built that well. I got a bunch of off-lease ones for a friend’s business since he was cutting my budget, most of them started dying off just after months use. Finally convinced him to raise the budgets and we went back to ThinkPads, those things just kept going. He still has some T61s in service.
"404 - User No Longer Available" (toni-cipriani)
11/02/2017 at 22:02, STARS: 0
Got a used first-gen X1 for my dad just a few months ago, he loves it.
"Patrick Nichols" (pnichols)
11/02/2017 at 23:56, STARS: 1
I’m going back to school for my masters and am looking at getting a pretty high end desktop custom built for around $1500, I would definitely hold out for something with an i7. For portability, I have my 2011 MBP that has swapped a 500GB SSD, 8GB of RAM, and replaced the optical drive with a 4TB HDD. Took some finagling since it doesn’t natively support a EFI install of windows 10, but I got it working and now I have a dual boot setup that can even run steam fairly well and a couple dongles make it work with whatever setup I have and software that needs to run.
If you’re looking to save money, check out your local business hardware liquidaters and then upgrade the hell out of it and drop in a new battery. PCs are easier to upgrade and tend to depreciate quicker so you could probably get a solid i7 laptop and upgrade the drives and ram for about $700.
"Textured Soy Protein" (texturedsoyprotein)
11/03/2017 at 11:57, STARS: 0
Ok, now that I had some time to look at the specs in more detail, I dunno, I don’t really like this ProBook 650. It’s big and heavy.
If you really want an optical drive and VGA port, the
ProBook 450
G3 and G4 (but not G5) have both of those things and are a good half pound lighter than the 650.
I configured a ProBook 450 G3 on HP’s site and it came out to $933 with these options:
Windows 10 Pro
Core i5-6200U with Radeon R7 M340 graphics
FHD screen w/ 2x2 wifi antenna
8 GB RAM
256 GB SSD
DVD+/-RW drive
Backlit keyboard
Intel 8260 wifi
6-cell battery
The HP site only let me put a 1-year warranty on it but maybe your vendor would be able to configure something similar but with a longer warranty.
Lenovo has a couple Thinkpads with both an optical drive and a VGA port but they’re just as big and clunky as that HP 650. So I think the 450 is your move.
The only thing with the HP 450 is it has HDMI and VGA ports but no DisplayPort. Looking around quick, there are male HDMI to male DisplayPort cables, and male DisplayPort to female HDMI, but no male HDMI to female DisplayPort. So if you find yourself often in a projector situation where the only way to connect to it is a male DisplayPort cable coming out of a lectern, then that may not be your move.