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| I have never opted for the extended warranty on any computer I have bought - PC or Mac. In my opinion, if a computer is faulty somehow, it will usually die within a year. I bought a new HP system once that was dead in less than 10 days. And I certainly would NEVER buy into a store's extended warranty. Since this is a laptop and if you plan to not "be nice" to it - say, haul it around in tractors, pickups, etc where vibration and general tossing around will happen, you may wish to take the extended warranty. Most warranties will not cover abuse, but vibration can work things loose that would be covered.
Memory - Your new Mac will have Lion on it or if built before Lion was released, you will get a free upgrade to it. Lion only needs 4 GB of RAM to perform well. Normally, I MIGHT advise you to take the 8 GB option to allow for future OS versions that may require it, but I honestly am thinking that Lion is the last of the Mac OS X series. I think the next major generation of Macs will be totally different than the current and will be running a desktop version of iOS in order to bring the two platforms together. Unless Apple figures out a way to run current Mac OS software on the new platform, there will be a huge uproar similar to when they switched to Intel, but Apple has never been afraid to leave the past in the past (right where it belongs, IMO). Therefore, I think I'd just stick with 4 GB since Lion runs fine on it if it were me - unless you plan to do some real heavy duty graphics or video stuff with it. If my prediction doesn't pan out, you can always upgrade later and the RAM chips will be cheaper later. The iMac I am typing on started out with 2 GB of RAM and it ran Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard before I finally had to upgrade to 4 GB with Lion. Mac OS is lean and does not require the RAM that a similar generation of Windows does to run well.
Hard drive - only you can answer this. If you plan to have thousands and thousands of digital photos or hundreds of hours of digital video, you'd want a larger drive. I have a 320 GB in my iMac of which I have used less than half - but have an external that I keep a lot of digital video on. If I wanted to keep it all on the internal, I would have had to opt for a much larger drive.
The difference between RAM and hard drives - RAM is the memory the computer uses to run the operating system and software. Hard drive space is what your computer stores all the files on that make up the OS, software, and data. | |
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MAC COMPUTER - EXTRA'S WORTH THE MONEY??
