Mac Book Pro for college

[Ghetto Sheep]

Hey, I'm going to be leaving for college in early august and convinced my parents to get me a laptop for my graduation present. RIght now im looking at a 15 inch, 2.16 processor, 2 gigs of ram and the 7200rpm drive. I was going to get it now as its fully maxed out and will last me a long time, however i do a lot of photography, like up to 20 picutres in photoshop at once and was wondering if merom would give a significant enough boost in performance to wait. I would need my computer by the 23rd of August at the latest and have no real idea when merom is coming out. Thanks in advance for the advice

 

[chairguru22]

im not sure when merom is coming out but if it isnt going to be this summer id say get it now so you have time to get used to the computer and take care of any problems if any were to arise.

in addition to the merom release date id look into any rumors on future promos that might come up and consider waiting for those, with your edu discount you can save more money.

 

[treblah]

The difference between the Yonah and Merom is gonna be trivial when it comes to Photoshop until Adobe releases a Universal Binary which isn't expected until Spring of next year anyway. And by that time the Merom will probably be looking at a refresh… It's a never-ending cycle.

 

[Abstract]

Don't bother waiting. Merom won't be out until after August, and even when it does come out, Adobe PS won't be faster because there's no universal or native Intel Mac version yet until CS3 is released. That may be at the end of this year, or in January 2007. Until then, you'll have to get used to "slower than desired" Photoshop speeds.

And Merom won't be much faster than Yonah at the same clock speed......not using real applications. However, the Merom processors will be a bit faster than current Yonahs because they'll be available at higher clock speeds upon release.....better than the 2 GHz Yonahs the MBPs use today.
There's a difference between the two statements I just made, because what I'm really trying to point out is that waiting for Merom is like waiting for a faster Yonah to come out. Of course(!!!) there's going to be a faster Yonah coming out 3-5 months from now. Merom is only special because it's 64-bit instead of 32-bit, but how many 64-bit applications can you count? It'll be a while before 64-bit sweetness will be widely available. By that time, you may be due for another new laptop anyway.

 

[wako]

isnt merom 64bit though? Yonah is only 32bit... that means apple decided to move OSX to 64bit, people who were the early bird adopters are screwed... kind of...

 

[inmotion]

actually.... osx is already 64 bit... so early adopters are not screwed at all
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/64bit/

 

[xfiftyfour]

i think i heard that the actual boost was only about 20%? i'm not sure if that's exactly correct, but if it is, i'd suggest just going ahead and getting your machine now, since you're going to be needing it by around august, and there's definitely a good chance the new MBPs won't be out by then.. also, like someone else already mentioned, considering it's a rev A computer, you may or may not have issues with it, and i bet you'll be glad you have the downtime of summer to get it shuttled between you and applecare, before you REALLY need it for school.