How to Choose Your Perfect Mac

Over the past few months, many people have written in asking for advice on how to buy a Mac. To be honest, most people are looking for me to help them convince themselves on an “up-sell.” For example, there are plenty of people who want to know why they should purchase a MacBook Air instead of a MacBook. If you exclude the Air’s wonderfully small size, the MacBook is a far better value, but it’s going to make sense for some people to spend the extra $500-$800 on the Air.

My goal in this article is to get you thinking about what is important to you in your computer. If you’re a computer user who always has “power envy” and need to have the fastest Mac available, buy a Mac Pro. For the rest of us, though, it’s worth contemplating how our computer dollars are best spent. The following explanations and recommendations are purely my own and do not translate into any truth about computers. Take them with a grain of salt and use your best judgement at the Apple Store.

What kind of Mac users are there?

In my experience, especially after three years at the Apple Store, I’ve come to believe there are four types of computer buyers that actually have different, meaningful needs (regardless of why they buy computers):

1. Media Professionals. I’m talking about musicians and audio content producers, Photoshop pros and desktop publishers, and video editors. These are not people who want to dabble in iMovie. They run Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, In Design, and Quark XPress for their livelihood.
2. Gamers. Gamers are people who use their computers for a variety of tasks, but in the end, they want powerful machines for playing games, usually for hours on end. They are the ones most likely to have “power envy,” albeit with a partially good reason: new games require a lot of power.
3. Stylish Laptop Owners. The reality is that there are people who will buy the $1299 Aluminum MacBook instead of the $999 white MacBook because of the more expensive model’s style. The same holds true for the $1999 MacBook Pro purchaser who needs nothing more than the MacBook, as well as most people who buy the MacBook Air.
4. Everyone Else. I know this is going to make you angry, but whether you’re the CEO of a Fortune 500 company who sits in Word, email, or a database all day; or you’re student; or you’re a parent buying a home computer; or you’re an aspiring blogger, most of you actually do not have any special computer needs. You may have completely different wants, and that’s ok — we’ll focus on those next.

Now, you might argue that people who buy computers for games and for style are buying based on wants rather than needs. That’s true to some extent, but my grouping above is to show you where most people place their #1 priority: media production, games, style, and “general use.” Whether you think it’s a good idea to put games or style first is another question altogether.

Separating Needs From Wants

While you can consider many needs and wants for your computer, I’ve narrowed these down to the ten most common criteria new buyers have asked me about. These exclude the style criteria, since there’s no right or wrong answer here. If style is a “want” for you, try to narrow down your choices based on your other needs and wants, then decide how much style is worth to you.

First, click on the graphic below to see the chart I created for these criteria. If a box is green, it means the computer is a good choice for the particular criteria. Yellow means it is an acceptable choice, and red means it is an unacceptable choice. There are a few areas with red-yellow and green-yellow boxes. These are meant to be somewhere in between those two colors.

• Portability. This deals with the ability to easily take your Mac with you. Obviously, laptops fit this bill, and desktops do not. Of course, the Mac mini is small enough that you could take the computer with you, but you’d need to have a monitor and keyboard in each location you want to use it to truly consider the machine portable. At the same time, most laptops are about an inch thick and weigh 5 lbs. The Air is much lighter and thinner. The 17″ MacBook Pro is larger and more expensive but has a much longer lasting battery.
• Expandability. This criterion is all about adding additional internal components, such as hard drives, video cards, and other PCI Express cards. The Mac Pro is the only Mac that can do this, even though most Windows desktops have internal expansion slots. You can add components externally to all Macs, and most Macs have user-accessible slots for adding RAM.
• FireWire. All Macs used to ship with FireWire, but the Aluminum MacBook and MacBook Air have dropped FireWire ports and rely exclusively on USB. The white MacBook still has a FireWire 400 port, whereas other Macs have at least a FireWire 800 port. Many external storage drives, digital video cameras, and audio processing boxes use FireWire, though the majority of external devices rely on USB.
• Dual Display. Since the Mac mini was updated over the last month, the entire Mac line is now capable of having two screens mirror each other or capable of having two screens span a left and right side.
• Gaming. Gaming has significantly improved on the Mac platform since Apple switched to Intel processors, but it has only been since the Mac mini was updated in 2009 that the entire Mac line has a dedicated NVidia graphics card. Thus, while all Macs are capable of playing games such as Unreal or World of Warcraft, the laptops simply do not perform as well as the desktops. The MacBook Pro is clearly better than the other laptops at gaming, whereas the iMacs and Mac Pros are very capable.
• Internet Productivity. This category includes anything you can do on the internet — surf the web, write email, blog, banking, instant messaging (including video messaging), and anything else. All the Macs do these tasks very well. Sadly, Adobe’s Flash and Microsoft’s Silverlight are still not optimized for the Mac as much as they are for Windows, so they will tax the processor more than other applications.
• Business Applications. Business applications can be best described as data-entry applications. Microsoft Office, Quicken, Quick Books Pro, iCal/Address Book, and any other business tool you can think of requires very little processing power. Thus, all Macs run these applications very well.
• Photo Editing and Desktop Publishing. This is the hardest criterion to analyze. If you’re just using iPhoto or laying out a newsletter in Pages, all the Macs are more than capable of handling your work. If you’re a professional photographer or handle a local newspaper, in all honesty, you should using a 24″ iMac or Mac Pro. Why? Because all the other Macs have 6-bit displays that do not display true color. Instead, the screens are “dithered” — meaning colors are blended to approximate the colors you want to see. This is fine for most of us, but for professionals, it’s unacceptable. The slower speed of the laptop hard drives (unless upgraded) also limits photo rendering speed.
• Video Editing. The same analysis as in photo editing applies here, but the hard drive speed is even more of a factor. Video files are huge, and the faster your hard drive is, the faster you can manipulate the video. Mac laptops and the mini have 5400 RPM drives (unless you customize the MacBook Pro drive to include the faster 7200 RPM drive). If you’re a video professional, consider a Mac Pro or 24″ iMac unless you truly need the portability.
• Audio Editing. Audio editors also want to take advantage of fast hard drive speeds and large amounts of RAM, but here, a dithered screen doesn’t matter. All Mac computers except for the Air include audio inputs, though professionals will likely add their own components. Consider the limitations of the MacBook not having FireWire if you are looking at a portable audio studio.

Other Considerations

• Screen Size. Media editors and people with poor vision can take advantage of large screens like the 17″ MacBook Pro and the 24″ iMac. More screen real estate means you can see more of your content without having to scroll. It also allows you to enlarge text without sacrificing too much screen real estate.
• Backlit Keyboards. The 15″ and 17″ MacBook Pros have backlit keyboards which increase battery life by lighting the keys with LEDs rather than the light coming off of the screen. That way, you can turn the screen brightness down, see the keys, and increase battery life.
• Video Playback. Whether you occasionally play a DVD on your computer, watch a TV show on Hulu, or use your Mac as a home media server, all Macs are capable of handling DVDs and high-definition streams. More processing power = more capability, but they’re all capable of handling at least one stream.
• Value. I love laptops, but they will never be as good of a value as a desktop computer. If you want to get the most computer for your money, the low-end iMac is still a better computer than the 17″ MacBook Pro. If your iPhone does most of what you need when you’re away from home, maybe you don’t really need a laptop.
• eBay, Craigslist, and the Refurbished Apple Store. Finally, don’t forget about buying used Macs. I do it all the time (I think it’s a sickness). Macs tend to have fewer problems than Windows computers, and they definitely have higher resale values. Thus, investing in a used Mac can be a smart investment, especially if you’re unsure whether you want to spend $600 or $2,000 on a new computer. The online Apple Store also sells refurbished computers that have full one-year warranties, which is another good option.

I hope that this article has given you a few things to think about in purchasing your new Mac. My article is certainly not exhaustive, and you might disagree with my assessment. No problem. In fact, you should add your ideas to the comments section so that other readers have a chance to consider them before they make a final decision.

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Tagged as: apple, Getting Started, mac