Best Way to Buy a Mac

You see, I have just become a Mac owner. I bought a refurbished MacBook Pro from the Apple refurbished store.  I got the higher end late 2009 model. It is amazing the price that I got it for and the quality of the product. Let's just say that I got the higher end MacBook Pro (late 2009) for less than the base line MacBook Pro (mid 2010). I have saved a great amount of money and the quality of the product is no different than a brand new Mac as well. The only difference that I found is the package that it comes in. The new products come in nice luxury boxes, but the refurbished Macs come in a white box.

Another way to great way to save money on getting a Mac is the discounts that you can get on the Apple site. If you are buying Macs for your business or if you are a student or a teacher and if you are serving in the military, you can get a discount on your Mac. The higher priced the Mac, the better the discount. The best discount that you can get off the Apple website is the educational one. You get your regular discount that you get with the other categories, but when you are a student you get a free 8 GB iPod touch with it, which is a really good deal.

If you want a brand new Mac and you cannot get a discount, the best thing to do is shop around. The Apple retail stores and online stores doesn’t always have the best prices. You can find them $50-$100 cheaper on other websites. When I buy an Apple product I always make sure the place I am getting the products from is an authorized Apple vender. To help you guys I out, I put some of the better websites that I use below:

http://www.macmall.com 
http://www.macconnection.com/
http://macsales.com

The last way that you can buy a Mac is used. I do not advise buying used Macs online, however. When you buy it from a friend or someone you know that's different, that way you have the ability to check it out and see if you really want it.

Intel Core i9

Intel has been making a lot of new processors like the core i5 and the core i7 both being four-core processors . But the core i9 is a amazing six-core processor which will be using the Intel Nehalem Microarchitecture in the 3 nm shrink. The core i9 is also called Gulftown.  We do not know any reason they they call it that but I have always believed that they went to some 10 year old kid and asked him what should we call our next processor and so he goes and makes some weird name up like Nehalem. The core i9 server version will be the Xeon 5600-series. There is no news on a mobile version of it right now but after it comes out they may make one but until than let’s just wait and see.

The intel core i9 will be coming out in the in quarter 2 aka the towards the half of 2010. The core i9 benchmarks are 50% faster than the corresponding quad core Xeon for parallel tasks. Despite having 50% more transistors, the CPU strongly benefits from 32-nm engraving as it drains 50% less power in idle mode. The core i9 will be the most power fullest processor  yet.

If you are going to build a computer next year I would wait until the new core i9 comes out. Also if you are going to buy the apple mac pro I would wait as well because rumors say that it will be getting it but when the mac pro will get it they will have two of them which will make 12 physical core and a huge 24 logical cores which will make it so much faster than the old mac pros. So I would wait to build a computer and wait to buy a apple mac pro.

I hope you enjoyed it and fell free to leave a comment under this post.

Caleb F.

My Thoughts on the Zune HD

I have been using iPods for along time in my life and I also really love them. I don’t really like Zunes, but it is not because of it being made by Microsoft; it's just the music store, compatibility and also the software. But this might be the first Zune that I like. There are still thing that have to change.

The Zune HD has got a 3.3 inch OLED multi touch screen. It comes in a 16 GB version and a 32 GB version. It has almost has every feature that the iPod touch has like MP3 playing, video playback, web browsing and an app store. But the app store is very small; there are not a lot of apps and they are not the funnest either. The feature that is almost one of the best on the Zune HD that the iPod touch doesn’t have is that it has a HD radio, which is a really good feature. The zune HD also has a amazing battery life that can last up to 33 hours of wireless off music playing. The Zune's new music store is really nice, for only a cheap 15 dollars you can get unlimited music off the Zune music store. The thing that get a lot of customers angry is that the software is only compatible with PCs. This just goes back to the war between Macs and PCs, but that is another blog for later on.

When it comes down to it the Zune HD is a very good media player. If you are not looking for a big app store like Apple has, you will enjoy all the other good thing on it. The Zune HD might even be the first Zune I will ever buy. If I do buy it, I will make a review on it. I hope you enjoyed it and if you have any questions just email me at coolcaleb.f.3@hotmail.com

Caleb F.