I'm very tempted to get a Macbook Pro but....

Can you run msn, outlook/office, divx, torrents, nero on a macbook?

This is what i mostly use on my laptop for so I'm just thinking if I would lose that if I took the plunge and got a macbook?

Also would I be able to play x264 HD movies?

I really do love the look of the macbook pro especially the keyboard and the amount of space you have for resting your wrists and the screen looks pretty decent too.

 

If you really want to, you can dual-boot Windows with it...

 

there is a default apple mail client, there are also free email clients that are better than apple mail or outlook. check out thunderbird, among others.

msn can most likely be handled with adium, i forget the specific protocols that adium supports. adium is a mac osx instant messanger client. it can definitely do aim among many others.

microsoft office is available for mac, along with mac office, and neo office is a free alternative you can use while you decide what you really want (or you might just end up liking neo office)

there are programs that handle torrents for mac osx. azureus is available for mac. utorrent will be soon. its in like an internal beta or something at the moment.

there are also really good optical drive utilities for mac osx. disk utility is built into the operating system and is really good. Toast is an excellent disk application also.

you can definitely play h.264 movies. Quicktime handles .mov files by default, which are .264 i believe, and VLC or mplayer can handle everything else.

edit:

adium does work with msn i just checked

 

There are Mac alternatives to all of those programs if you do not wish to dual boot.

Instant Messaging: Adium & iChat

Video Playback: VLC & DivX (for Mac)

Office 2004 which has Entourage - the Mac equivalent of Outlook - Office 2008 coming sometime

Disk Burning: Toast Titanium 8

 

everything is completely covered, it is really great nowadays isn't it? it is getting closer to the point where compatibility is becoming less and less of an issue.

there really are the standard programs out there for each setup, and are basically all free.

 

Thanks for the info guys.

Really appreciate it.


I have some .264 rips of bluray movies which are 4-8gb in size and I am using KLM player to play them on my laptop.

Would a macbook pro be able to play these and if so through which app as I presume that KLM player will not be mac compatible?

It's really reassuring to know that most of the apps I currently use have equivalents in a mac?

Does adium work exactly like msn i.e. would the other person be able to wee webcam, what you're listening to, and be able to share files?

Also does the mail.app allow you to use hotmail accounts and gmail?

Thanks in advance.

 

MSN for mac can not do video chatting, you may want to be aware of that.

 

yeah you might have to convince your friends to switch to skype for voice and video chat.

 

No clue what KLM player is, but the ability to play certain files is more dependent on container type and the decoder (and of course your hardware), rather than the player (well of course the player has to be compatible too)

That said, I've had slight performance issues with 4GB Blu-Ray rips on the MBP (not as a limitation of it being a Mac, but simply due to the hardware specs in laptops as a whole and decoder limitations- for example, even in Windows ffdshow simply may not be able to decode fast enough...and you'd have to use something like coreavc).

I use a combination of mplayer osx, vlc and quicktime/perian on the OSX side. One of the drawbacks (but also advantages) of QT with mkv files is that it preloads the entire file at the beginning (taking like 10 minutes to do so). But after that, it runs even smoother than VLC or Mplayer.

EDIT: Also keep in mind that the MBP 15" has a resolution of 1440x900. Your Blu-Ray rip will most likely be much higher than that, so you might want an external lcd.

 

Do you mean Media Player Classic in the K-Lite Codec Pack? That's what I use in Windows. Anyway VLC will play virtually anything.

Also, if you have any DVD rips saved as images files (.iso, .img, etc.) Mac OS X loves them. You can just double click the image and the OS recognizes them as a DVD (like if you were to mount them in Windows using Daemon Tools). Then you can just play them with DVD Player or VLC or whatever.

Adium works great. So does iChat. Neither is exactly the same as MSN, but all the essential features are there, you just have to adapt to them, which is easy.

Check out Apple's Leopard website. It's the new version of OSX to be released in October. There are some amazing features and videos to show you all about them. The iChat (Leopard) video is impressive.

The current Mac OS is Tiger and there are also videos for iChat (Tiger).

You can use GMail in Apple Mail. GMail & Apple Mail Setup Instructions. I imagine Hotmail is also compatible, but I don't use Hotmail.

 

Thanks for that.

So will ichat in leopard allow you to do video chat in msn?

Also, is it true that the macbook pro doesn't come with a card reader? That would be a bummer as I would want to use a memory stick from my phone and also an sd card from my camera.

 

sadly there is no media card reader built in to the macbook pro. you can get extremely cheap (price-wise) usb card readers on the internet. check out www.newegg.com or www.tiger.com.

 

Unfortunately iChat is the best IM client on the Mac but only supports AIM and not MSN or Yahoo. So iChat can video chat (and does it very well) but not with MSN or Yahoo users, just AIM or .Mac users.

I think its aMSN that does have support for video chatting with MSN users. I'm not completely sure.

 

adium is better overall than ichat in my opinion.

im not sure if it can do video chatting with msn clients. most likely not. just guessing.

who knows what leopard will bring. i don't think integration with windows clients is their top priority though... but its possible.

 

I found claims otherwise. Apparently you can Configure iChat to work with MSN via Jabber.

I haven't actually done this, but it's interesting nonetheless. I also read that some features are limited with this, like file transfers won't work between iChat and MSN users.

 

I found one on Amazon that looks decent enough:

http://www.amazon.com/EXPRESSCARD-34-5-1-Card-Reader/dp/B000M5FATY

 

yeah I've used msn through ichat with the method linked above, but I found it troublesome in that sometimes contacts would show up online on microsoft messenger and not in ichat. Also it's a hassle because the way your buddies are "routed", so you have something like mybuddy%hotmail%msn.xxxgateway.whatever so you have to rename every single contact you had on msn, not to mention that when you do it, it adds buddies you had blocked, deleted, etc. When I did this, contacts from a 2 year span that I deleted had been added again. All for the same thing you can do on microsoft messenger, I didn't bother. Maybe if i could video chat.

I've yet to try amsn but if it does let me video chat it is what i will use from now on.

It really is a shame a great client like ichat does not support msn. Oh well, hopefully they will get their act together and release a worthy update on leopard, or microsoft will get off their asses and work on a better msn messenger client for mac.

 

Awesome, I'm going to pick one of those up. Here's a favorable review for that model: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/macuser/reviews/120420/griffin-expresscard-34-card-reader.html

Is it me, or is that the only model available? Doesn't matter though, as it looks good anyway.

 

I have had similar problems. aMSN and Adium are both pretty bad and cant compare to MSN Messenger. aMSN does have webcam support bot no voice. Adrium has non and even chatting is not 100% stable. Contact management is really bad for both. MSN Messenger and VMware/Parallels is the only thing that works right. Skype for the Mac is also lacking a lot compared to the windows version.

 

Don't MSN and Yahoo Messenger now allow people to chat on both networks? I vaguely remember seeing this new feature. Maybe you can try out Yahoo Messenger on the Mac to chat with people on the MSN Messenger service...

 

Yes Yahoo and MSN are joined. There ia a mac version of Yahoo and also a mac version of MSN Messenger. But both greatly lag behind the windows version. Also there are no mods to make the mac versions ad free and remove other annoying things so they are pretty much unusable.

 

I just remembered there is another application called Trillian that allows you to connect to both MSN Messenger contacts, Yahoo Messenger contacts and even AOL Messenger contacts. Once you have an account any of those you can use Trillium to connect to all 3 networks.

http://www.download.com/Trillian/3000-2150-10047473.html

I don't know if they have a Mac version though...

Edit: Sadly there is no Mac OSX version available... bummer. Sorry about the false hope.

 

For chatting with multiple IM clients the best is Adium.

 

Adium wins any IM client contest on a Mac for text messaging, hands down.

As stated previously, only voice/video chat compatibility might be an issue, which is very much a non-issue for me at least (and I'm sure many others also ). To each their own.