Want to by a macbook but a few things concern me...

I recently bought a HP Pavilion dv2500 (core2 duo 2.0ghz, 1gig ram) Came with a x3100 integrated graphics. Has windows vista on it, runs quite well, although vista is resource intensive.

I'm thinking about selling this and buying the 2.16ghz mabook. I dont game but i'm concerned that the Intel GMA 950 graphics processor will lack a bit!
How does it run tiger? Will it be suitable to run leopard? I don't plan on gaming but I want it my OS to run smoothly!

Thanks in advance!

 

Don't worry at all. Tiger and Leopard will run perfectly fine on a GMA950. Unlike Vista, Mac OS X does not require a lot of resources. Five-year-old Macs run the latest OS X, Tiger, fine. So don't worry about it.

So unless you do graphics intensive work (note, Photoshop is not graphics intensive, its CPU and RAM intensive) or game, the GMA950 will be fine in terms of running OS X smoothly (for probably the next few OS X versions to come).

 

GMA950 can run Tiger just fine, and should also run Leopard without any real problems. The various special effects and animations are designed to be able to run on fairly low end graphics while still generally working well.

-Zadillo

 

Why is it that the newer mabooks still have a gma 950 and haven't been upgraded to the x3100?

 

there are no new macbooks as of yet if im not wrong

 

Apple just hasn't updated the MacBook line yet; the last update was just a spec bump (increasing RAM and hard drive). Santa Rosa MacBooks are probably coming in the next few months though.

In this case, Apple decided to update the MBP line to SR first.

-Zadillo

 

So how how do you think it'll be before an update to the makbook line? When was it last updated?

Would it be worth waiting for the x3100?

 

The last update was back in May, but it simply added slightly faster CPU's (from 1.83 C2D and 2.0 C2D to 2.0 and 2.16 C2D), and slightly larger hard drives and RAM. This update was more just about allowing the MacBook to keep up with the expected specs, etc.

It's hard to say when Apple will do a Santa Rosa update of the MacBook line. I wouldn't be surprised to see something in August or September, but there's no way to know really.

Regarding waiting for the GMAX3100; it depends I guess. On the Mac side at least, I don't think you'd notice much of a difference performance wise. If you are going to be using Boot Camp you might see some benefits in games, etc.

EDIT: I saw your main concern is just whether the OS will run smoothly. Honestly, the MacBook with GMA950 should run Leopard just as smoothly as a hypothetical updated Santa Rosa MacBook with GMAX3100.

 

The last update was May, as zadillo said. I don't think there's going to be an update until October the soonest.

It depends what you do. The X3100 will help a bit in some games, but if you're just running Mac OS X the GMA950 is already enough.

 

Thank you for your replies, you've been very helpful Think i'm going to like this community

 

The CPU upgrade in May was actually a move to the Santa Rosa class CPU's...slight better power usage etc...with out the Santa Rosa chipset/graphics.

Apple probably wanted to consolidate its purchases to one CPU type.

 

I'm not sure what you mean by "Santa Rosa class". The CPUs on the Macbook are still the Napa-based Core 2 Duo's. They were around before the Santa Rosa CPUs. They have nothing to do with Santa Rosa at all. Same power consumption as before the spec bump... or maybe more (I'm not sure), since the clockspeed is faster. The FSB speed is still 667 MHz, not the 800 MHz speed of most of the Santa Rosa CPUs.

Vista runs fine on GMA 950 too.

 

Yes, but OS X Tiger runs on 512 MB of RAM fine as well. Let's see Vista do that .

 

It does, actually. But not with the Aero interface, unfortunately.

 

What about Parallels? What is the minimum Mac machine, processor, RAM, etc. required to run Parallels?

 

Well, you'll need at least an Intel-based Mac (Parallels can't work on a PowerPC-based Mac). As for RAM, it would depend more on the OS you were going to run. Technically speaking, if you had a Mac with 1GB of RAM, you could probably run Parallels and allocated 512MB to the VM, at least enough to run XP. Generally you'd probably want the machine to have 2GB of RAM though so you could allocate a full 1GB of RAM to the VM.

If you wanted to get really hardcore you might want 4GB of RAM to be able to allocate even more memory to the VM.

 

Thanks. 2GB sounds good.

Would the Macbook do the trick, or is the Pro better for Parallels?

 

I don't really understand what you are talking about here. Please expand upon this.

Josh

 

Running Parallels on a MacBook is fine, the only reason you might want to run Parallels on a MacBook Pro is if you're going to play games through Parallels (which I'd recommend you rather do through Boot Camp) or use graphics-intensives applications through Parallels. If you're just running Photoshop or Office through Parallels, 2 GB is good and you won't need a MBP.

 

I sold my HP laptop yesterday and so i'm laptopless for a while.

I'm looking for a Macbook, however I wonder if:

1) They upgrade to the X3100 it'll be a large improvement (I know i've been told otherwise but if I have a 3 month old laptop and they bring out the never integrated graphics processors that do make a difference i'll kick myself.

2) I buy a macbook available now (2.16ghz core2duo) and upgrade it to 2gb's ram. Will it be worth upgrading this machine to 2 gb's rather than waiting a few months and possibly buying a Santa Rosa core2duo with integrated X3100?

This decision is very hard for me as I just sold a HP with Santa Rosa and integrated X3100! Maybe I'm just being stupid...

 

I think the question would probably be what do you plan on using the notebook for. If its the typical stuff like music, web browsing, e-mail, writing, etc. its not going to make any real difference at all.

Whether you're in OS X or Vista, GMA950 and GMAX3100 can both handle the advanced effects of the OS's, etc.

I think the only area where you'd see a really noticeable difference would be in games (at least on the Windows side); but frankly, if gaming is a concern, you probably want to be looking at a laptop with at least some form of dedicated graphics anyway (either the base model MBP, or a PC laptop).

I think that if you do need something now, the current MacBooks are quite nice, and the fact they aren't Santa Rosa really isn't going to make a noticeable difference really anyway for most things.

If you don't need something right away, it might not hurt to see if the MacBook line does get a Santa Rosa update with GMAX3100 in the next couple of months (I don't think this would be impossible).

But frankly, if I was in the market for a MacBook right now, I'd just buy one, as the sorts of things I'd at least use it for wouldn't make much of a difference anyway.

-Zadillo

 

I'm really not going to be gaming with it, I just don't want to "downgrade" in terms of hardware, I think it's probably because I'm used to the "microsoft" way of thinking - i.e need the best stuff to run the OS. I found the X3100 JUST ran the OS but not quite as fluid as I would prefer!

Realistically I think you probably wouldn't notice the difference between the 950 and the X3100 in the way tiger/leopard runs? Maybe it would be more beneficial to just upgrade to 2gb ram?

 

I saw Leopard running on the previous line of MacBooks and it worked fine (Apple store in a mall). I haven't noticed any problems while I was playing with it. Also, quite frankly it didn't impress me much on the software side, but the design was cool.

 

I just saw an old iBook G4 running Leopard beautifully on You Tube. Dashboard worked well with the widget "water drop" animation and speed was great. While it's true the iBook G4's had a dedicated GPU it was far from being acceptable for gaming. The only thing that should concern you is todays 3D gaming and if you are not worried about it then the Macbook will be a great buy.

 

Great! I know everyone has said the new macbooks will easily run leopard, but will they run it smoothly with all the new UI animations from leopard (and future releases hopefully) on that intel GMA950?

If I knew for certain they'd update to X3100 within the next 3 months i'd wait, however if its not going to happen then i'd buy right now

 

That's me.

I've said it before and I'll say it again... I really wish the MBP came in a 13.3" screen option. I much prefer the footprint size of the MB, but I'd like the matte screen and extra "goodies" of the MBP.

.

 

Based on Apple history, how do you guys think the price of a Macbook would be affected if an SR version is released?

 

To be fair, that sort of question can only be answered when we see it action. We can't answer about future releases, we know as much as you do. Tiger currently has quite a bit of animations and the current line of Macbooks with GMA 950 are not crippled. See, the concern I think you are having is the same concern from people using Windows Vista. Because Vista's Aero glass has high system requirements you think that Apple's OS will be the same.

Remember, OS X was built from the ground up and Vista was not. Vista is more of an overhaul of XP with added animations and graphics which greatly raise the system requirements. Don't get caught up into that, these are 2 different systems.
Now, if you just can't get past the GMA 950's limitations then don't get the Macbook. When the X3100 ends up in the Macbooks this concern will be raised again. To put your mind at ease the only thing to do is get a MBP since it comes with a dedicated high end GPU.

 

Based on Apple's history, they rarely ever change the prices even after an update. Or they might lower them, but I haven't seen them raise prices on a updated product yet.

 

Wow. That makes it tough to buy now. I was torn between buying now and waiting... but now I'll most likely wait.

Thanks a lot.

And thanks a lot!

 

http://www.macworld.com/2006/06/firstlooks/macbookgames/index.php

Here is an interesting article about how the amount of RAM affects GMA 950 performance in a MacBook.

Josh

 

Hehe, it depends what you're after and your current "need" for it. If you can resist the temptation , you might want to wait until October so even if there is no MacBook update then you will still have Leopard pre-installed.

If an update occurs in October, it won't be so significant that you'll look at a MacBook you got now and think its useless compared to the new one. X3100 graphics is nice, but still not good enough for good gaming. Santa Rosa manages power better, but its not going to add much to battery life. The Front Side Bus is improved, but RAM isn't fast enough right now to utilize it.

If you need your MacBook for school in September, I'd recommend you get it now, get used to Mac OS X and learning shortcuts and tips in using it, raise enough money to buy some software, so you're all set in September.

 

It's a "want" not a "need"...

Unless they make it lighter. If they make the MB smaller and/or lighter in October, I would hate myself for buying one now. That's Hate (with a capital H).

Nope, those days are long gone.

 

I don't see Apple making the MacBook any lighter. They'll probably keep it the way it is, and they might possibly launch an ultrathin, lightweight ultraportable MacBook Pro *drools* .

 

Ding Ding Ding... SOLD!

I guess I'm waiting.

 

Damn this "Vista" mindset of mine! LOL - I suppose it's because I have Vista running on my desktop and on that HP laptop I just sold...

A mate of mine just got a MacBook, going to go check it out tomorrow.

 

Vista runs fine on GMA 950 as well, and Vista runs fine on a Macbook.

 

Agreed, I didn't clarify myself. I was generalizing that Vista has high system requirements. However your posting should further help the OP understand that the GMA 950 isn't isn't as bad the press it's getting but for gaming it ain't happenin'.

 

Does the fact that the GMA 950 only supports DX9 vs the X3100's DX10 only affect gaming?? It has Nothing to do with the running of the OS?

 

The X3100 is not a DirectX10 card. Intel might bring out a firmware/driver update someday but dont hold your breath (Intel said a while ago that they plan to have DX10 support in early 2008).

The GMA 950 is good enough for any OS tasks that are not gameing. It even supports Aero in Vista and all the OSX featuers too. I am not sure if the X3100 has any HD movie playback support. A notebook with a GMA 950 can play HD movies too but then the CPU has to do all the work.

 

I can understand if you like Mac OS a lot, and I can agree with your point that Leopard seems to run fine on GMA 950, but for the love of god, don't post made up stuff you don't know anything about.

Vista does require more RAM than XP, that's true, but when you're speaking about Aero having high requirements, remember it runs just fine on GMA 950. Aero isn't what pushes the system requirements in Vista. OS X likes large amounts of RAM for caching purposes as well, so more is always better even on a mac.

And you claim Leopard was built from the ground up while Vista was not? Have you ever done any programming? Have you read anything about the developement processes of the two OS'es? Vista was "built from the ground up" just as much as Leopard is, that is, in several cases, not at all.

Something as complex as an OS is very likely to reuse a huge amount of code from it's predecessor, and this is true for OS X as well as Vista. There's a lot more new in Vista than some fancy graphics, just as there's a lot more new in Leopard other than a new UI. Vista might look as an overhaul of XP to some, but remember there's a reason Leopard is OS X 10.5 instead of OS 11.

I'm definately not advocating Vista as superior to OS X, but if you want to show how OS X is better please do so with some facts backing up your claims and don't just follow the current trend of bashing Vista with rumours and opinion without validating your claims.

Back on topic:

I recommend these two articles to any potential switchers:
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2232
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2326

It seems like the GMA 950 will be able to handle Leopard, but since more and more of the GUI is being offloaded to the GPU, there is a possibility that you might experience slowdowns when handling large amounts of windows etc. It'll probably work, but it might not work flawlessly under all circumstances. As always, we'll simply have to wait and see.

 

Something I've noticed making somewhat heavy use of Expose on my Macbook -- it works great on the laptop, but when I plug it into an external monitor, and it's got the extra pixels to deal with, it starts to chug. Sometimes it's almost as smooth as running at the Macbook res, but other times it skips nearly the entire animation.

Honestly, running Tiger on a gig, and Vista on a gig, I was happier with Vista's performance. (right now I'm running xp on one gig and os x on two) People sure like their Windows bashing...

 

this is a very interesting thread, n i feel the same as the poster of this thread as i myself is looking at macbooks too, only its an MBP. however, the anticipation of updates is just so great all the time! and without an explicit need for a new laptop, i feel like i am in the same dilemma as the poster, to wait for the update or not.

anyways, does anyone know the general update cycle of apple? i have heard its anywhere from 3-8 months (i think i am wrong). does anyone know anything about it?

 

Okay, you are definitely taking this way too far. The OP wants to know how Leopard will run on the GMA 950. I only used Vista as an example because you do have to have relatively recent hardware to run Vista as well as high system requirements. Several new $500-800 PC's can only run Vista with no Aero effects. I will leave it at that because my posting wasn't about bashing Vista, you made it that way. As far as my knowledge? I teach computer science so I know computers and I know Windows. While there are several new upgrades in Vista the biggest change overall was the WDDM which has been implemented in OS X since the Public Beta many years ago.

OS X was built from the ground up. Vista was NOT! Apple completely re-wrote the Mac OS and current software could not be ran on it. Only select apps could be written in carbon to allow people to migrate from system 9 to system 10. Windows Vista runs at least 70% of the software written for Windows since version 2000. If Vista was written from the ground up it wouldn't be just driver compatibility that was the problem, developers would have to write new software as well.

OS X can run on Mac hardware nearly 10 years back. That's from an OS built from the ground up. Vista is mostly full of new graphics candy to mimic OS X and implementing WDDM just slowed it down even more which makes quite difficult to run on hardware more 3 years back.

 

The MacRumors Buyer's Guide does a generally very good job of detailing the current status of all Apple products, when their last update was, and things like the average time between product updates, etc.:

http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/

 

Product MacBook
Recommendation: Buy - Product recently updated
Last Release May 15, 2007
Days Since Update 63 (Avg = 202)

4.6 MONTHS till the next update. Just find it hard to buy when its old technology. I'm not desperate for a laptop just yet, but it's quite something waiting nearly 5 months :/

I could splurge and get the base model MacBook Pro, only reason I wouldn't want to do that is if I don't need such a powerful machine I'd be wasiting my money!

 

Well, any time you buy something it's eventually going to be old technology. We're not that far off from Intel's new Penryn processors, for example, and then not too much farther off from the new Montevina platform next year.

I think you basically just have to ask yourself what you plan on using the notebook for. Again, for most things, the actual difference between GMA950 graphics and GMAX3100 graphics would hardly be noticeable. If you're buying a laptop for things like word processing, web browsing, e-mail, etc. it isn't going to make any practical difference.

If it is in your budget, I do think the base model MBP is worth considering. You do get a larger screen space to work with, while still having a machine that is quite thin (1" thin) and light (5.4 pounds) for a 15" laptop. And you do get a fair number of niceties, such as a nice GPU, LED-backlit screen, illuminated keyboard, etc.

-Zadillo

 

Zadillo at the moment it doesn't make much difference, but in a few years the new Mac OS etc could require a lot more from the GPU, and that would affect my purchase.

 

Fair enough. But if you're concerned about it, you should be looking at an MBP with the 8600M GT.

Hypothetically speaking, if the next version of OS X does anything that would tax the GMA950, it is frankly probably going to tax the GMAX3100 as well.

Generally speaking, Apple has historically been pretty good about making sure that current OS releases can run on fairly old hardware. Just as an example, the minimum requirements for Core Animation are something like a Radeon 9600, which covers a number of fairly old Macs by this point.

-Zadillo

 

I apologize if I misunderstood the point of your post. I just didn't see how bringing up Vista performance and claiming it was somehow worse than OS X helped answer the questions of the OP. Vista bashing is popular nowadays, and it looked like you were after a cheap shot at Vista with your post.

If we agree that "runs" means actually running the program, and not measuring how well that program runs, and use that same definition for both OS X and Windows, the conclusion is: Both can definitely run on a GMA 950, but your experience will be better with a better GPU, since the likelihood of slowdowns decrease. Tiger tends to get slowdowns on GMA 950 if you use expose with lots of windows for example.

I also have to say that you are completely right that OS X was developed from a new codebase compared to OS 9 (Doesn't mean they didn't reuse code or functionality though). Since Apple tout their incremental updates (10.4->10.5 is relevant for this case) as comparable to the updates Microsoft do with every new OS, I really meant these incremental updates when I said OS X wasn't "built from the ground up". Sorry for the confusion, I expressed myself poorly.

So if we compare Vista to it's current counterpart, which is OS X 10.4 (Tiger):

Both Vista and Tiger will "run" on computers that are quite old, but both would be near unusuable. System requirements for Tiger are 256MB RAM, and we both know running any OS on minimum requirements can be quite unpleasant. With Tiger caching to RAM as much as it does, I'd say system requirements for a useable experience are about equal for Tiger and Vista. This is true for RAM as well as for GPU. Tiger on a G3 wouldn't be pleasant at all.

I'll end this discussion now, I just wanted to explain myself.

I hope the OP already got an answer to his question, if not, I'll just recap my opinion:

If you are worried about everything running as smoothly as it possibly could, you should go for the MBP. If you aren't obsessed about very small occasional slowdows or are a very heavy multitasker, the MB should be fine.

Leopard will make more use of the GPU, which doesn't really change the above reccomendation, but the differences will probably be more noticeable.