The Laptops

Lennonabbeyroad

Lennonabbeyroad

Registered
I have an ibook G4 and i did love it intill i got final cut pro and motion 2 and found out that upgrading an ibook is nearly impossible. Are all the laptops like this? Can any of them (like the new Macbook pro) be upgraded easily like the towers can?
 
Huh? What exactly are you looking to upgrade?

With laptops, you're relegated to upgrading only the RAM and hard drive. All other internal upgrades are impossible (with the exception of some older PowerBooks, which can be sent off to companies for processor upgrades).

If you're truly a professional video editor, then purchasing the iBook to run those programs, in my opinion, was a mistake. You probably paid as much for those two pieces of software than you did for your iBook alone (iBook ~$1500, Final Cut Studio [the only legal way to get Motion 2] ~$1300)!
 
This isn't an issue with just Apple laptops. Most every laptop out there is only upgradeable to a certain extent. You can upgrade the RAM, HD, and that's about it. Everything else is basically a proprietary design since it has to be made small and light enough to be portable. This isn't so much an issue with desktops since they're meant to be in one place. Whether you get an Apple, Dell, Gateway, etc., your'e only going to be able to upgrade it so much.

Now, there are some laptops that allow you to replace the CPU and some other things but these laptops are meant to be desktop replacements or portable desktop systems. These laptops basically use desktop CPUs and are usually very heavy, have poor battery life, and generate a LOT of heat. Now you might say that the Pentium-M would be able to make up for this and I do believe there are Pentium-M upgradeable laptops, but again you're talking about something that wouldn't be designed with portability in mind and that's assuming that it's using the same components that make up the Centrino (IntelPRO wifi, Intel 9xx chipset, Intel Pentium-M/Core Duo or Solo).

Again, it's not specifically Apple but anyone that's manufacturing a laptop nowadays.
 
Thanks for all the help. basically i'm a college student who didn't really know what i was doing when i purchased the ibook. When i started getting interested in film making and editing i found the imovie and idvd to be greatly lacking the abilities i needed for my ideas and projects. And the thing that made me the most upset is that apple seems to really be marketing this final cut studio as a consumer software product, now i wasn't disappointed with the fact that i purchased a professional level software, its is actually what i was hoping for and wanted, but the marketing sheme of apple made me kind of assume my barely one year old ibook would have no problem running it. also i brought final cut pro 5 and motion 2 thats it, i can do this because i am a student which is a plus.
 
Ah, I see... well, I do use Final Cut Pro 5 on an older PCI-based G4 machine (listed in the sig) and it works just fine... albeit somewhat slow. Then again, the final result is a direct reflection of the operator's talent, and not the speed of the computer -- a faster computer won't make you any better at cutting video.

I'm a student as well, and I gotta agree that discounted software available separately from their packages is great! It's amazing how much of a discount we get sometimes -- for example, here in Texas, I can get Microsoft Windows XP and Office 2003 Professional for under $60 combined. Office 2004 for Mac isn't much more than $20, and upon graduation, those educational licenses become full-blown licenses. SWEET!

I don't think that Apple markets Final Cut Pro/Studio as a consumer-level product, though. It's not advertised on TV, all the reviews of it are professional-level reviews, and it's priced WAY out of consumer-level applications... where have you seen such advertisements, or where did you get the idea that Apple markets it to consumers as opposed to professionals?
 
Probably the student pricing might have done that. And the nice packaging, probably, helped as well. ;)
 
Ok then... professionals and FUTURE professionals -- I wouldn't call a student using Final Cut Pro for a project for a graphic arts degree or video production degree a regular old consumer... ;)
 
Hey yeah i love final cut and it works great, also its not speed i'm after, motion just plan won't work. i could care less about speed. also i think that after i purchased my mac i noticed all the advertising for the final cut products, through emails and the apple webpage and that combined with the huge student discount may have thrown me off. and once again i wanted a professional software i think when i said they marketed it to consumers was a bad example, it was the way they marketed it that made me assume my computer was strong enough to run it. Basically i just learned my lesson, check specs before buying.
 
It's a pretty good idea to check software's System Requirements before purchasing it, especially with things like Motion that need good, fast processing.

I'd also hate to work with Motion at 1024x768, personally.
 
Yeah -- even though Apple is the same as other companies and uses some high-pressure, in-your-face advertising, it's always, in the end, the consumer's responsibility to do the research.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top