Which Macbook to buy?

When it comes to storage on a computer, there are basically two questions here.  The first is "what type?" and "how big?" 

The two types of storage these days are hard drives and flash drives.

The first kind, a hard drive, is the most common.  A hard drive is an electromechanical device that basically involves spinning platters inside an airless enclosure at a high rate and reading/writing data.  The faster it spins, more or less the faster it works.  5400 rpm is a standard laptop drive speed.  Hard drives have a low price per gigabyte.  They are also subject to damage from dropping and bumping the laptop causing mechanical failure, etc.  But they are a really well established technology as I said so this sort of failure rare.  Hard drives use more electricity so they hurt battery life.

The second kind, a flash drive, is all solid state, nothing mechanical, based on flash memory chips like your digital camera uses.  This is a newer technology, and more pricy per gigabyte.  They are not subject to mechanical failures, they use less power, and so on.  And they transfer data more quickly so the computer feels snappier in use.

There is actually a third kind, a hybrid drive, which sort of combines the two so you get faster and bigger.  Kind of unusual, but if you see it in ads you know what it means.

The "how big?" question: well, more is not always better.  Bigger hard drives are more expensive, can use more power, etc.  I'd trade a 250 gig 7500 rpm drive (smaller, faster) for a 500 gig 5400 rpm drive (bigger, slower).  The 128mb flash drive is even faster.  Camera photos aren't that big, neither are songs.  Docs are tiny, tiny, tiny.  Ten 8 megapixel photos will take more space then every homework assignment your daughter will ever write.  What's big are high resolution RAW format "real camera" photos, and movies.  Your average movie is 4 gigabytes

A refurbished machine is usually a customer return and factory repaired.  Something went wrong, they fixed it, or it was an open box, or something.  That's why it's cheaper.  With a full factory warranty, you'll likely be OK.  Only you can decide if you want "new new" or "refurbished new".

Bottom line: if you want this to last through high school by the Retina with 128G solid state drive.  You can always add external Flash drive storage for pictures, etc if you need it.  128MB for a seventh grader will plenty, and you'll want the durability and speed and battery life of flash drives.  I have three daughters, it's hard to get a laptop to last more than 3-4 years without "sorry, Dad, I dropped it" along the way.  Durability is good!  And your daughter, day-to-day, will much prefer using a machine that's faster, with a better screen, and better battery life, than one with more storage (likely unused) but lesser screen and shorter battery life.

 

Disclosure: I work for Microsoft, so really, I must say, buy a PC!  C'mon now, really a Mac?  How about a nice Windows 8.1 touch machine?

http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/list/Laptops/categoryID.62685400#/filter=%5B1000%2BTO%2B1249.99%5D

BTW Best Buy's PCs are currently lacking, at least when I looked last month.  We're in the middle of a model year changover, with newer "this year" laptops replacing the inventory of "last year" laptops.  So you may be able to find some great deals.  But when I looked last month, they had the picked-over, left-behind detritus of last year's models, and were waiting for new ones.  Maybe they have them now.  You do have to beware that sometimes a "great deal" is because it's the last-year's model that's being sold off to clear inventory.  Apple is really obvious about it: they sell you the old model and make it clear it's cheaper BECAUSE it's the old model.  PC world hides that more.

Feel free to PM if you want other opinions, PC or Mac.  I can be unbiased. :-)

 

Edited by brucemorgan 2013-11-29 1:32 PM

Thank you so much! I wanted to get her a regular PC but she begged for a Mac and my husband agreed. I have to say the kids always impress me when they go to our friend's house and they make awesome movies on the Mac!

I'm a computer guy in that I do computer forensics. I live in UNIX and have not voluntarily logged into a WIN machine in probably 15 years. The whole office has our pick of what we want for a desktop and it's pretty much universal everyone's got a Mac Pro.

I looked up one day at home and found I have more or less everything Mac makes. This took me a while to figure out how I got there but it seems to be a logical progression when I sat down and figured it out.

Your questions:

5400 rpm hard drive is a slow hard drive. Don't sweat it, you can get larger, faster drives to add on when you figure out what you really want. The battery for the laptop will not last as long with this, it will take longer to boot and the drive will spin up and down as you use it. Not necessarily bad things, just stuff to keep in mind.

flash drives are FAST. They're also expensive compared to spinning drives. 128 Gb is plenty of space for most things. When it starts getting full, an external drive is well worthwhile anyway.

That said, if I were looking at:
college classes
like doing, uploading and keeping graphics
same with movies
same with songs (this is very much a lower space requirement than the video stuff)

That 13" would be really attractive. You would need an external drive. Unfortunately the motherboard memory cannot be changed. The hard drive is easy enough to change out to a large Solid State Drive (SSD) when you wanted to.

I'm writing this on a MacBook Pro

Lacking the pedigree of Bruce or Daniel; we've got 2 MacBook Pro's and a MacBook Air in the household (all grad gifts for daughters). Have ONLY RAVE reviews for all of them (got an iMac for myself after the 1st MBP!!). I personally prefer the Air for lighter weight, and I believe everything's going to the cloud these days. I find that as far as entertainment, my daughter's generation is streaming media rather than DVD's

Thank you again for all of your help. We ended up with the MacBook Pro - whichever one is the middle level one with the retina display. I would probably have picked one of the two lower ones but my cousin who is a big Mac lover convinced me she would fill up the lower level ones with her pictures and videos too quickly! I want this to last for a few years so I paid the extra.

Now my daughter is getting extremely lucky because this was supposed to be her only Christmas present but I couldn't resist and bought One Direction tickets this morning!