Macbook pro/air

I'm on my phone. This is going to be short, I'm curious regarding the overall stability and reliability of a Macbook, and as I am looking into one as a laptop for college. A few simple questions are how often does it crash, overall reliability ex: parts breaking, and any other helpful things. Thanks abunch

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From my experience, they're just as reliable as any Windows notebook... provided it's got a decently clean Windows install. I only get kernel panics rarely, just as in Windows 7 I hardly ever get BSOD's.

For school, I'd either consider an Apple or a Windows business notebook. I'd actually lean towards the business notebook just because they have oustanding warranty and service.

As far as parts... the only thing you have to worry about with the MacBooks is if you drop it you'll dent the unibody shell. Those are kinda pricy to replace, but they do hold up well. It doesn't take all that much force to dent the casing, but it DOES take a good bit to actually damage internal components.

 

you realize that you could have typed significantly less by omitting the fact that you were on your phone and how short the post was going to be

I feel like I'm trapped in the most recent episode of South Park.

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I would say that reliability is relatively high among laptops, but not the absolute highest (maybe lenovo?). As far as stability, do you mean in OS X? OS X is stable.

 

Unless there's a specific piece of software you will use at school that requires OS X, or you intend to use OS X for at least 70% of your computing, you would be better off buying a business-class Windows notebook (ThinkPad, Elitebook, Latitude).

As far as Apple's reliability, I've had no problems with either of the two MacBook Pros I've owned. A potential advantage for owning a MacBook is being able to take it to an Apple store in the event you need service. Now if the Apple store near you is no good or you indeed don't have one in close proximity, there goes that leg up.

IMO, Apple offers the best quality consumer-grade notebooks with Sager/Clevo close behind.

 

Another potential advantage for Apple is their resell value. It's fantastic!

 

I was mostly concerned with software stability and hdd stability because my hp crashed on me and I had to recover my files using ubuntu, which introduced me into the Linux world . Initially I had planned on a M11x r4 but now finding out it is discontinued I'm opting for a Macbook and ill just buy myself a nice new gtx 680

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Software wise, OS X has crashed less on me than Windows 7 has on my various systems. That mainly has to do with the program that I run: MATLAB. On my Win 7 machines, MATLAB has stalled a bunch of times due to me running macros that have thousands of lines of code working with Excel files that contain hundreds of thousands of data points (and each macro references at least another one). On Windows 7, when someone isn't entered right, MATLAB just stalls and so does the entire OS forcing me to complete a hard shutdown. However, under OS X, I can simply force close MATLAB while everything else is fine.

That is just my experience under very specific conditions though. Both OS's are fine when treated properly and neither are perfect. OS X can crash just as Windows 7 does. It all depends on what you are actually doing in the environment.

As far as an HDD, a MBA is going to provide more physical stability than a model with an HDD mainly because it uses SSD. No moving parts = better reliability. A MBP or any other notebook with an SSD installed will be the same. You can have an HDD crash in a MBP just like you can with other notebooks. It all depends on how you treat the notebook. I know someone whose HDD crashed in their MBP within the first 2 months of owning it. Granted, they stuffed their MBP in a packed old style business bag without any type of protection. It was so compressed in there that the MBP's display often contained outlines of the keyboard keys. They also threw their bag around and generally didn't take care of things.

My MBP had an HDD in it for the first 9 months and I didn't have any issues. You can also get lemon units from Apple just as you can from other manufacturers, it all has to do with the manufacturing process and that is just the mathematical nature of assembly lines (and there isn't anything that can be done about it).

 

software stability of OS X is good. Apple doesn't make hard drives, those components are outsourced to the same companies that make hard drives for all brands of computers. If you're worried about physically damaging your hard drive by moving it, get an SSD.

 

Hard drive "stability" has nothing to do with the notebook manufacturer but rather the company that made the drive itself. Apples are no more reliable than any other company in that regard. It's luck of the draw; you could get a good one, you could get one that fails within 30 days of ownership.

I will say, though, the Toshiba and Fujitsu drives Apple uses/has used have been great. The 160 GB drive that originally came in my 2007 MBP is still going strong in my PS3 *knock on wood*.

 

Thanks guys, seems like it's overall reliable, now it's time to wait for that refresh...

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If a macbook air motherboard dies, how do you get the data off the ssd stick?

 

in my case pop it in an x220 and boot from ubuntu usb drive with HSF enabled

but you should be able to pop it in another matching air or laptop with mSATA support
or use msata to sata adaptor http://www.microsatacables.com/sata-adapters-converters/msata/

 

Nice to know!

 

There's a significant difference between reliability of a company like Apple and a few of their select competitors, like Acer. However, most of the other manufacturers have similar reliability rates. It's possible that component selection or component manufacturer selection has something to do with that.

Like you said, it depends on the company that made the drive. However, since we generally don't know that, we can evaluate the results of a notebook manufacturer's ability to select good drives by looking at their failure rates (I suppose).

 

Generally it seems apple has one of the lowest hardware failure rates in comparison to its competitors so that's why I was asking

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They're sort of in the middle, but definitely in the "good group" if you wanted to fit companies into categories.

 

There is another reason to go Apple for college: Power Adapters. It is much easier to bum a charge off of someone if you have a magsafe adapter than any other laptop for the most part.

 

Haha that's a great point thanks!

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Not to mention that Apple's power adapters, even the large 85 watt one, are generally smaller than ones that come with Windows notebooks. Apple's 85 watt adapter is even smaller than the AC adapter that came with my HP netbook. That makes it a lot easier to put in a backpack or bag without adding too much bulk. The power adapter comes with an extension cable but you don't have to use it. Without the extension cable, the AC adapter for my 13" MBA is about twice as big as the one that came with my iPad.

 

Seems like om going to get a Macbook, now for that refresh

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If one of your major criteria is reliability (and it seems like it from your posts) just want to point out that depending on the size of the refresh, there could be glitches that appear after a refresh that may affect stability. All depends on the type and size of the re-fresh, but if it`s major might affect the reliability that you`re seeking while things get worked out. Maybe that`ll be worth it for whatever may be offered by the refresh, but just thougth I`d point out the negative side to refreshs...just saying...

 

Yeah kind of like the recall Intel had, I don't need it til the end of summer so if there are that significant of issues I can hold off. Thanks for the point

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Previous gen is a safer bet when it comes to major revisions, but its worth the risk to me since I have a working 4 year old backup machine.

 

....what? Why would it be easier to get someone to let you use their socket?

the REAL benefit of Apple's chargers is the magnetic latch. If someone trips over your cable while you're not looking and you have a $1000 one-time use [crappy] frisbee

 

I think he meant that there are tons of students who use Macs so it would theoretically be easy to borrow an AC adapter in an emergency. Might not be a bad way to meet a member of the opposite gender either (or same if you swing that way).

 

I think another poster's short cord theory was debunked, because you might be using the extension, whether you like it or not, depending upon the way the socket's polarity would allow the pins to go in.

 

Off topic from OP's question, but you can force a MATLAB program to stop in Windows by pressing Ctrl + C. That'll halt all code execution, freeing up your system to do whatever else you want to do.

 

Which won't help with me since the systems actually stall while running the code, my code just gets too complex for them to run at times causing Wndows itself to crash. I can try to stop the code from executing but it doesn't help since Wndows itself has stalled forcing a hard reboot. That doesn't happen to me on my MBA with OS X.

 

matlab is a hog. always has been. use some other rapid prototype system.

 

I can't. The macros for my research are written in MATLAB only. Besides, I don't have to worry if I run everything on OS X.

 

Hog or not, Matlab is by far the best tool for numerical / scientific computing.

You can port your stuff to GNU Octave pretty easily if you stick to simple plotting and don't create Matlab GUIs. At a language level they're fairly compatible. I've done that before in order to work on something at home where I can't afford a Matlab license. But I doubt Octave offers better run-time performance.

 

That is a much bolder statement than you might realize. Matlab is certainly not *by far* the best tool for any entire domain of computing.

It's an adequate tool for certain types of programming, and Mathworks offers the type of support that institutions sometimes depend upon.

 

Besides, MATLAB is not the only IDE that you could use with MATLAB code. GNU Octave is a free IDE that'll work with about ~90% (pulled out of my ...) of MATLAB code, and the only incompatibilities I know of are with certain Mathworks MATLAB - specific plotting code.

R, Fortan, and C/C++ are good alternatives for numerical/statical computing.

 

potentially necessary alternatives. depends on the requirements of the project.

 

I've used a dozen or so mathematics & numerical computing packages including most of the big commercial ones. While I'm not an expert in all of them I've enough breadth and length of experience that I'm happy to stand by that statement. I don't think it's particularly bold or an uncommon view.

What's a better tool for scientific/engineering/numerical computing, or what would use suggest as an alternative for the MATLAB user?

MATLAB and Octave are not IDEs.

I use Octave at home (see first post on this page) and have managed to port a lot of MATLAB code, but there are a lot of little incompatibilities and idiosyncrasies, particularly in the library functions. You also have to avoid or restrict using structures, cell arrays, many of the plot types and options, GUIs, and MathWorks toolboxes. I'd say they're compatible enough to make one-time ports from MATLAB to Octave reasonable and sometimes easy, but not compatible enough for most people to use interchangeably with the same code base.

See here for more info:

Octave <-> Matlab Compatibility Database

 

My mistake ...


Anyway, I plan on using MATLAB in my spare time, but I probably won't be able to use Mathworks' software in the future (hence my consideration of Octave). Thanks for the link, it's pretty helpful. +1

 

Octave is great, but I won't kid myself. I'd be using Matlab at home too if it weren't so expensive for non-students.

If you do need to go back and forth between the two, it obviously helps to partition the incompatible stuff (e.g. plotting) into modules and maintain separate versions of these modules. But if you're heavily dependent on one of the toolboxes, that could be a bigger problem.

 

Again, you just don't realize the scope of the domain you're talking about. Matlab is a good product, but they don't the highest level of performance or the highest reliability among the options available to programmers. It's also not the best tool for large, collaborative projects, for a variety of reasons.

It can be really useful for smaller groups in a lab setting, or for engineers, especially for quick prototyping given the large libraries of functions that come with matlab.

It's less of an appealing choice for writing long term extensible code. The licensing can make it impractical to run your code (depending on the libraries you leverage, your licensing, etc) distributed across multiple computers. Depending on how many computers you want to distribute across, the impracticality could start to outweigh the prototyping benefits.

A lot of the library functionality that's offered in matlab is available (less directly) in more common programming languages that offer higher performance, like C++ or Java, or C#. Of course, these languages require more programming muscle that Matlab, so the choice depends on a lot of factors. Prototyping vs. production, experience of the programming team, the number of people on the team, performance requirements, data reliability (if the computer runs out of memory, for example - how much control do need over it's behavior at that point, could depend on how disastrous a reliability failure would be), distribution requirements, library selection, difficulty to recreate the functionality or adopt a separate library, etc. These factors (and more) can influence what the best choice is for a particular project. Matlab is certainly not *the best tool by far for numerical computing*. It's a pretty solid tool for a lot of engineering and scientific computing, especially for prototyping, but it's relevancy depends a lot on the particular project you are doing.