Hey Mac guys! Which Macbook should I get?

[brassburnz]

I only got to the bolded part. Do you get to build battle bots?

About the closest thing we have to battle bots are sumo bots. The robots are designed to push another robot off of a circular table top that is painted black with a white border. The robots have a light sensor that detects the white border.

Most of the kids program the robot to move forward until it detects the white border then reverse direction. Some of the robots have ultrasonic sensors to "look" for the other robots and attack. Others will program the robots to move randomly on the surface until they engage another robot.

DISCLAIMER: These are not my students, but is the same sort of stuff we do.

[brassburnz]

Bought the 13" 2.4GHz MacBook Pro and a PC for my wife.

With a budget of $2,500 I figured I could buy any MacBook Pro I wanted. I already have a 13" MacBook Pro on my desk at work and wanted something to use at home. I was leaning toward a 15" i5 or i7, then made a huge tactical mistake--I asked my wife for her opinion.

Well, the long story short, I ended up buying the 13" inch 2.4 GHz MacBook Pro for me and an HP laptop for my wife. She had been bugging me for a new laptop ever since her old one started acting up. I actually bought her a netbook for Christmas because one of her friends has one and she said she wanted one of those. But after a while she stopped using it, Oh well.

Here's the breakdown for what I got:

MacBook Pro 13.3" 2.4GHz, 4 gigs/250 $1,199
Education discount -100
Applecare 249
Education discount - 66
Canon Pixma Printer 149
iPod Touch 8gig 199
Applecare 59
Sales Tax 9.75% $1,893.13

Wife's Laptop 640

Grand total $2,533.13

I'll be getting $299 back from Apple. $100 for the printer. $199 for the iPod.
I could have stretched the budget a little to get the 15" i5, but I think I'll just save up again and get an iMac for Christmas. The 27" Quad Core is NICE and it's only $1,999 less $100 for the education discount.

If there's one thing I've learned from 22 years of marriage is everytime I buy something and the wife is involved, I have to buy her something as well.

Fortunately, she can't tell one AR upper from another. Whenever I do have to bring my rifles into the house, I always break them down so she doesn't really know how many I have. She also can't tell the difference between 1911's and Glocks, so as far as she's concerned, I have two of each!

[bigmike82]

"Fortunately, she can't tell one AR upper from another. Whenever I do have to bring my rifles into the house, I always break them down so she doesn't really know how many I have. She also can't tell the difference between 1911's and Glocks, so as far as she's concerned, I have two of each! "

This thread would make interent history if your wife suddenly posted on this thread.

[brassburnz]

"Fortunately, she can't tell one AR upper from another. Whenever I do have to bring my rifles into the house, I always break them down so she doesn't really know how many I have. She also can't tell the difference between 1911's and Glocks, so as far as she's concerned, I have two of each! "

This thread would make interent history if your wife suddenly posted on this thread.

Shhhh!!!

[stphnman20]

Get the i5.. i7 is kinda over doing it unless you play games.

[Demonfart]

First of all, anyone that teaches young minds the beauty of LEGO Mindstorms NXT robotics programming is a bonafied hero in my book. Kudos!

For the Macbook Pro you likely need to follow the video editing golden rule of "buy as much processor speed as you can". I do most of my editing on my Mac Pro but I do use my Macbook Pro on location very often. In my experience processor speed is a big factor for that. Someone also mentioned a Solid State hard drive and I absolutely agree. I run both my macs on SSD's for my OS and the boost in speed can be staggering.

Applecare is a really nice option. I buy all mine from Ebay of all places, super cheap, you'll get your code via email the same day (usually), and I've never been burned.

Good luck! And sometime if you've got the spare cycles you should do a post about your robotics teaching, maybe show us a project or two, I'd be willing to bet more than one Calgunner would get a real kick out of that.

[brassburnz]

Demonfart,

I teach at a NASA Explorer School. Our NASA Center is JPL where they coordinate all of the robotics exploration of space. Our kids get to interact with JPL on a regular basis.

We had a chance to participate in NASA's Summer of Invention program a couple of weeks ago. During the last few days of summer school, we got the kids involved in a hands-on math application where they build rockets out of construction paper, launched them, then used triangulation to determine the altitude of the rockets.

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