The Starving Student 
How to get your dream Mac without blowing your entire college fund.
The Basics.
If going to school is your full-time job, you’ll need a Mac that can go wherever you do. That’s a laptop, of course, and for the typical starving student, we’d recommend a MacBook to start. At press time, the 2.1GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook (www.apple.com) came with a bare-bones price tag of $1,099, but we have a hunch that by the end of the year, you might see the MacBook’s base price inching closer to $999. If possible, we recommend starting with a 2.4GHz processor and 250GB hard drive ($1,499 as configured) and bumping the RAM up to a total of 4GB after the fact ($49.99 from OWC, www.macsales.com; and $51.99 from Crucial, www.crucial.com). Although Apple makes some of the comfiest notebook keyboards around, Apple’s Wireless Keyboard ($79, www.apple.com) and Wireless Mighty Mouse ($69, www.apple.com) come in supremely handy—especially if you’re usually using your notebook on a desk.
Desktop use is the other reason we recommend the Rain Design mStand ($49.90, www.raindesigninc.com).It keeps the notebook stable and lets you raise the screen a bit so there’s room on the desk for a wireless keyboard and mouse. Of course, the beauty of the wireless keyboard is that it can communicate with the MacBook from afar, making it possible to control the ’Book sitting on a desk from across the room while you’re, say, lying on your bed or lounging in a beanbag chair. Meanwhile, LaCie’s USB & FireWire Hub ($89.99, www.lacie.com) magically multiplies the number of ports on your MacBook, giving you spots to plug in four USB and two FireWire devices. It also sports a tiny desktop fan for when your dorm room gets too stuffy. You’ve most likely got a pair of earbuds for your iPod already, but to listen to music at any hour without bugging your dorm mate, Sennheiser’s PX 100 collapsible headphones ($69.95, www.sennheiserusa.com) are compact but comfortable, and you can fold them up and stow them in your backpack for use with your MacBook at the library or coffee house. Since you’ll need to use your Mac setup to print papers, a sturdy printer is in order—and reliable inkjet printers, such as the HP Photosmart D5460 Printer ($99.99, www.hp.com), are refreshingly affordable.
Extras.
A backpack to tote your ’Book—and your books—is a must-have for any student, starving or not. Finding the perfect pack can be a subjective endeavor, but the Timbuk2 Underground Daypack ($85, www.timbuk2.com) comes as close as we’ve seen to perfection constructed from ballistic nylon. It holds your MacBook, textbooks, iPod, a sweatshirt, and so on, while two large exterior pockets put other necessities (wallet, keys, mints) in easy reach, and there’s a water-bottle holder too. Without assuming too much about “the kids these days,” we’re betting it’s not a reach to take it for granted that the typical student is already packing an iPod of some variety. So although it’s not a Mac add-on per se, the Griffin PowerDock 2 ($49.99, www.griffintechnology.com) has slots for two iPods (or an iPod and an iPhone), and juices them up simultaneously—so if you’re feeling generous, you can offer to charge your dorm mate’s ’Pod, too.
Keep your ’Pod family charged up and ready to rock.
Step it Up A Notch.
If you’ve got about a grand more to spend on your rig, you’ll want to step up to a 2.4GHz 15-inch MacBook Pro with 2GB AM, and a 250GB 5,400-rpm hard drive ($2,049 as configured, www.apple.com). Just as we did with the MacBook, we’re going to advise you to step up to a total of 4GB of RAM after your ’Book arrives ($49.99 from Other World Computing, www.macsales.com, and $51.99 from Crucial, www.crucial.com). This setup will work well for business travelers too, and for that user profile, we also recommend adding the Apple MagSafe Airline Adapter ($49, www.apple.com). A pair of earmuff-style headphones will stand you in good stead whether you’re a businessperson doing a lot of airplane travel or a student rocking out at all hours between study sessions. Check out the Sennheiser HD515 ($129.99, www.sennheiser.com), which combine the perfect balance of comfort (they weigh a mere 9 ounces) and sound quality.
Sennheiser’s HD515 Gaming ’phones have shiny chrome accents.
Stash all your digital stuff on the My Book Home Edition.
In the printer department, the Canon Pixma MP620 Photo ($149.99, www.usa.canon.com) is a capable all-in-one that even lets you print photos taken on a camera phone wirelessly via Bluetooth. If you’re a typical student, you spend more than you probably should buying MP3s—the key word there is buying—so you’re going to need plenty of storage for all that digital property. The Western Digital My Book Home Edition 500GB external drive ($159.99, www.wdc.com) can house music library without burning up too much cash.
A Physics Geek and His Mac
Name: Andre Bach
Occupation: grad student in physics
Gear: 15-inch MacBook Pro (2.5 GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM)
Someday, physics grad student Andre Bach might be responsible for discovering what governs the particles that make up everything on Earth—and he uses a Mac.
Andre Bach is a physics grad student at UC Berkeley doing research in Switzerland at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which just happens to be the world’s leading lab in particle research. Bach works on a project with the James Bond-ish name of the ATLAS experiment. ”We aim to discover the Higgs boson,” Bach explains, not really clearing things up for us physics know-nothings (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson). “The Higgs boson,” says Bach, “is the only thing in the standard model of particle physics that hasn’t yet been seen.” The goal of the project is also “to uncover evidence for new theories and phenomena.” They want to know more about the fundamental laws governing particles that make up everything on Earth and in the known universe. To do so, the team at CERN working on ATLAS speeds up protons to almost the speed of light, smashes them together, and analyzes the particles that result.
Bach uses a Mac at the lab and at home for his personal computing. His needs run a little heavier on the horsepower than the average student, considering his area of study, which is why he uses a MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM and two displays (“courtesy of our tax dollars”). “One big advantage to using a Mac in the field of particle physics is that all of the dedicated servers/supercomputers we use for storing and analyzing data are totally Unix, so the *nix background of the Mac makes interfacing with them effortless,” Bach says. “I get all of the compatibility and command-line power of a Linux personal machine with all the ‘it just works’ quality and shininess of the Mac.” Besides Mac staples like Apple Mail, iTunes, and Mozilla Firefox, Bach runs a cadre of physics geek tools, including Mathematica, a Mac version of GNU Emacs called Aquamacs, Terminal, X11, and a specialty data-analysis package. For his personal stuff, Bach uses Aperture to organize and process photos shot with his Nikon D40. If money were no object and he could have his true dream setup, Bach says he’d double up on Macs, plunking an eight-core 3.2GHz Mac Pro with at least4GB of RAM, the GeForce 8800 GT graphics card, and “all the fixings,” plus an Apple 30-inch Cinema HD Display on his desk. While he’s visiting Fantasyland, he’d also throw in a 1.8GHz MacBook Air with a solid-state drive for travel. Back in the real world, Bach says his MacBook Pro provides “the requisite balance of power and expandability.”
benet
November 10, 2009 at 7:01pm
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pegasusbsb27
October 12, 2008 at 5:58pm
Yeah...They are expensive in Brazil (Don't ask me why but Apple products here are more expensive than in neighbour Argentina, for exemple!), but never mind...this year was my Apple year! I bought my first iMac 20'' 2,4 GHz and my first iPod 160Gb. Thank God the dolar started to up after my shops!!!
cdnair
September 27, 2008 at 5:16pm
I've noticed that this article seems to be pimping out the Western Digital hard drives quite a bit. I just wanted to make it clear to anyone in the market for an external HD, that, though the value may be there, these are absolutely horrendous machines. If all you're using it for is to plug into a desktop computer and leave it there, you may be alright- if you don't bump the desk... walk around the desk too heavily... blow on it too hard...
I'm a film student and have heard endless horror stories that almost always route back to the failure of their MyBook. Footage for final short film projects, important interviews, footy for demo reels; gone. And this is with proper plug/unplug (power downs, disconnecting from the computer) and transport ever so delicately in the original packaging.
I can strongly recommend LaCie drives myself. Yes, you may pay a bit more, but you do get what you pay for, and sometimes can find some great deals on certain models. Bought one a year ago and have been known to cram it, cables and all, into the bottom of my backpack and go. Needless to say it's got a few surface scratches, but it's given me no problems whatsoever.
nightshrill
September 27, 2008 at 1:54pm
Mr. Reeee, I think you are a tad confused about the overall point of my and others comments. I, at least, was not arguing against the overall price of a mac (although I feel as though I could make an argument against it, as I can build a custom pc for about 800 dollars that compares equally or better to an iMac). The point is that the editors of MacLife for whatever reason put a computer that is more than 1,000 dollars in category recommended for "Starving Students", which is absurd in its own way. As Brendan had also mentioned, pc magazines do this all the time to, if you're a starving student the only thing I'd recommend aside from possibly a real "budget" pc is go build one yourself on the cheap. Yes it'll be underpowered (for example, an intel pentium dual-core processor, not a core2duo) but it'll serve the average user well.
Mr. Reeee
September 27, 2008 at 8:57am
Why complain about the cost of a new Mac, when you can buy a used machine?
You can get a 1 or 2 generation old Mac for 1/2 (or less) the cost of a new machine. If it needs more RAM, that can be bought and installed easily.Macs hold their value well and remain useful years longer than your typical generic Dell or HP DOSBox running Windows.
I generally sell my Macs on craigslist when they're 1 1/2 to 2 years old.
I'm happy, because I've paid for half my new Mac.
The person who buys it is happy, because they get a good, well cared for machine for half price.
It's a win-win!
gmsquires
September 26, 2008 at 3:05pm
Yes depending on what "your" budget is will determine what you can afford and what kind of pc you will be able to get. If you are stuck for something under $500 then you may be rather limited and have to settle for a rather udner powered no name brand unless you can find a refurb or used machine. As to the Macmini not having a fan, it does have a fan and it has a temp sensor to activate the fan only when needed. I have a mini and have been very happy with it. It is generally over the $500 amount unless you can get a refurb and if you add memory it boosts the price. A bare bones system adding in Ubuntu linux may be an option depending on if the video card will work with it.
njdevilsfan
September 26, 2008 at 1:19pm
i agree completely hopefully apples new products or updates on oct 14 send the price back a few hundred dollars
Brendan Bartholomew
September 26, 2008 at 12:47pm
Nightshrill, I feel you dude. For what it's worth, the Windows PC-oriented magazines and sites are just as guilty when it comes to having some sort of gross disconnect between what they imagine we can afford and what we can actually afford. I could maybe afford a bit more if I had a dime for every time I've paged through some PC publication whose cover story was something to the effect of "We Build up a Blazing Budget Bare-Bones Kit that won't Break the Bank!" or "How Low is the Low End? We Look at Eight Entry-Level Laptops that Won't Loot Your Life's Savings!" or maybe "Fiscally Frugal Frag-Fests with Five Affordable Form Factors to Prevent your Piggy Bank from being Pwned!" If I'm foolhardy enough to delve into these articles in search of any kind of bottom line, I will inevitably find myself in a state of shock when confronted with the jaw-dropping price of what they're calling a "budget" system. I seem to recall more than one of these publications recently pitting "affordable" mini-towers from Dell, HP, Lenovo, and all the usual companies against each other in order to determine whether any of them were really adequate for meeting a computing dilettante's basic needs. Affordable to them meant computers that cost at least $650, with most of them retailing for around $850 or more. At that just-under-a-thousand-dollars (!) price point, they tend to conclude, you can, in fact, purchase a system for your grandmother that will be up to the task of meeting her basic e-mailing and Web browsing needs. At which point I want to reach into the page or through the Internet so I can grab the editors by their shoulders, shake them vigorously, and shout in their faces, "HELLLOOOO, Earth calling! Down here in the real world, a budget PC is that loss leader in the Office Depot ad that's $299 after the alleged rebate! It's that refurbished, de-branded HP mini-tower that Geeks.com is selling for under $200 with no OS but a dual core processor and plenty of expansion slots! That's what a cheap PC looks like out here in the real world, and if it's gonna cost $850, it had better be equipped to perform sexual favors for its owner, or it'd better be a fully loaded Mac Mini!" Both would be good, but the Mini has no internal fan, and you wouldn't want it to overheat, you know? But.... I digress...
nightshrill
September 26, 2008 at 5:15am
I know that this is clearly a mac publication/website, however I think it is worthwhile to point out as a "starving student" who happens to work + go to school full-time that blowing 1,099 dollars on a computer is not "budget" what-so-ever, especially compared to Asus' epc (or however they spell it), or even your standard run-of-the-mill dell/hp/toshiba, sure you don't get as nice hardware with any of those options but it is by fear cheaper than 1,099 dollars. I think to call this the "starving student" option is absurd. If you're a starving student get a cheap laptop and slap linux on it.
