Almost the same exact story here. My Mac Pro was almost 3 years old and had less than 2 months left of Applecare. They tried to fix it twice. Both times it still wasn’t working right. So the Apple store swapped it out for a brand new top of the line unit. And for my troubles they upgraded me to a Nvidia GTX285 Video card.
Slackware FTW!!!
I personally can’t stand the Apple offerings.
In your case - MacBook Pro, without a doubt.
I ended up going with the MacBook Pro i5 and 8 gigs RAM.
Any input if the Apple “one on one” program is worthwhile?
This is in addition to the AppleCare which I did purchase.
I see no compelling need for it.
Agreed. You are set. I have the same machine except mine is an i7
Agreed
If you are in a tech track (for example, information security) you will probably be able to figure out what you need. My impression of the 1-1 is for the newbie users who are not technically literate.
As Littlelebowski wrote, you will find yourself running a lot of *nix and some Windows programs if you are in INFOSEC. If you check out the SANS offerings you will see many of the incident response classes are based on Linux. And even in Windows there is a lot of command line (SANS Command-Line Kung Fu was great).
If you want to pony up the extra dollars, the Mac Pro is nice. Check out the Apple Store for Education for some (minimal) discounts on Macs.
You can use a Mac at our agency if you are certified, so a lot of people run *nix on a Dell or some other commodity PC. I just picked up a Toshiba R700 for traveling, because while a big 17" screen, i7, 8GB monster is nice to use, carrying it sucks.
He already made the purchase.
:embarrassed: day late and dollar short on my reply.
Here is a list of software that I can download for free for school.
Any particular suggestions for either Mac or PC.
Allegro Common Lisp
Analytica
Carnegie Mellon Web Certificates
Ciscat
Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client
Fetch
Fugu SFTP
Identity Finder
Java Runtime Environment (JRE)
Kerberos for Macintosh
Mathematica for Students
Matlab
Oracle Calendar Client
Oracle Calendar Client / KFW
Oracle Calendar Sync
Public Printing Installers
RobotStudio
S-PLUS
SAS
SSH Tectia Client
Spybot - Search & Destroy
Symantec AntiVirus
X-Win32
X-Win32
If you have need or want to screw around with it, why not? Disk space is cheap.
Which?
Whatever ones you have a need for (like to access the college VPN), or to crunch data, or want to play with or try out.
Any or all as you need them or want to screw around with them.
If you don’t plan on taking any AI or programming courses, you don’t need the Lisp (though it is an interesting language to use).
I don’t know what you need so cannot say in detail what you want or should try.
I know he bought it but I’m giving my .02 cents anyway…
Mac is the easy choice. It’s the most secure, the highest quality hardware and OS, by far the most flexible for running multiple OS’ either by virtualization or bare metal boot.
BTW when I went to the University of Illinois in 1990 after getting out of the Marine Corps the Apple student discount was around 40% off not $100 like it is now.
You can do much better than the Apple education discount. Apple insider keeps a list of best Mac deals here;