Thinking about changing to a mac in my old age - advice?
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I had a acer with windows 7 and loved it but it was dieing .
So I went shopping ,and got a windows 8 , what a mess.
took it back and got a Mac Book Air and an external disk drive.( so i can watch my movies.)
You cannot load programs like the windows but , you can buy a windows 7 program and add to it so you can have both ,
I have yet to do that , it'a an extra $100.
The mac is proving it's self a bit of a challenge learning, fortunately there is e apple store in town that gives free help.
That is impressive.
I get 10 hours per charge on this laptop and it starts and stops almost instantly the moment you open it ,if you don't shut it down altogether. Enter your pass word in it's on , no moving parts .
That means a lot because I ride a motorcycle and that's usually rough on electronics. this is impressive.
there are a lot of things I have to learn yet like exporting pictures and such, but I'm getting there.
Not all programs will run faster with an SSD. Many will. Photoshop is a great example. Photoshop uses scratch disk files to manage all the data it has to deal with. Putting these scratch disk files on an SSD will lead to a significant improvement if dealing with large images.
The same applies to video and sound editing software.
If you use up all your RAM, an SSD will be much faster than an HD with virtual memory; enabling programs to be more responsive.
Thank you soooo much! This is very important information to me. One of the reasons I'm thinking of getting a Mac, is because I want to learn how to do video editing. And a friend of mine who is a Mac user, who also creates videos with music, etc., said I should get a Mac to do this.
Thanks everyone for educating this old lady lol! I'm still teachable, though.
However, I am on a budget. So, from what everyone has taught me, it looks like a used Mac with SSD and a good amount of RAM should do the trick. And I think I can get what I need if I can budget at least $400, and preferably $600. I expect a tax return next year of $600, and that is my Mac money. If I can do it for less than $600, all the better.
Thank you soooo much! This is very important information to me. One of the reasons I'm thinking of getting a Mac, is because I want to learn how to do video editing. And a friend of mine who is a Mac user, who also creates videos with music, etc., said I should get a Mac to do this.
Thanks everyone for educating this old lady lol! I'm still teachable, though.
However, I am on a budget. So, from what everyone has taught me, it looks like a used Mac with SSD and a good amount of RAM should do the trick. And I think I can get what I need if I can budget at least $400, and preferably $600. I expect a tax return next year of $600, and that is my Mac money. If I can do it for less than $600, all the better.
I just want to reiterate a point I implied earlier. In most cases, RAM has a larger impact than SSDs on performance.
SSDs are much more expensive than hard drives when it comes to megabyte per dollar. With video editing, you need a lot of space to store videos and video editing programs need a lot of space to work with videos. An SSD of reasonable size for editing video may be out of your budget.
I just want to reiterate a point I implied earlier. In most cases, RAM has a larger impact than SSDs on performance.
SSDs are much more expensive than hard drives when it comes to megabyte per dollar. With video editing, you need a lot of space to store videos and video editing programs need a lot of space to work with videos. An SSD of reasonable size for editing video may be out of your budget.
Let me throw my .02 in here. As a previous poster mentioned the ram is much more important for video, minimum 4 ram but more is better.
If it hasn't been brought up already I'm afraid you are striving for 2 different ends: an inexpensive laptop & editing video. Editing video is one of the most taxing jobs for a computer, cheap & editing video don't go together. I would be concerned that you would get an older cheap Mac on eBay that would struggle with some of the newer hi def formats common now.
The Mac Book Pros are the common video editing laptop, they are also the top of the line laptops. If you live near a large urban area perhaps craigslist may have people selling older mac laptops with video edit programs already installed & they can demo the edit capabilities for you. Ask the eBay sellers about editing video on their goods.
A lot depends on how much you want to get into the editing, what formats you will need to edit & output & what program will you be doing the editing with.
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