shoulda bought a mac?

yeah but the whole reason you buy a mac is for the logo.. cant you get a pc that performs better for less$$?

yes.

My son did his research prior to heading off to university a couple of years ago and mentioned the MacBook Pro was a better buy than what he was looking for in a Windows built system. He is one of the few people I know where his partition is 90% Windows(Bootcamp) and for the gaming he likes; Alienware as an example does not give the performance and build quality the Mac does. He was back for the holidays and still mentioned the Mac was the best option even to date……He did mention heating was an issue when ran to max performance but a cooling pad solved it right away….

If I wanted a MacBook pro equivalent but didn't want apple what would it be?

HP x360, Lenovo Yoga, Dell XPS, Asus Zenbook.

yeah but the whole reason you buy a mac is for the logo.. cant you get a pc that performs better for less$$?

Having a computer based design job I was the spokesperson for Mac a few years back. After them repeatedly screwing me and the level of quality going down the toilet. I now own zero new Mac products and will never give another dime to itunes.

apparently lots of people switching from MAC's to Surface Pro's

My ski bud owns a small town main street electronics store up here, he sez that he must turn over all product in the store 5 times a year to be sucessful, ask buddy if a product is any good he talks about how many he had to send back, so when it comes to LT's he found that good to best were Acer-Asus-Lenovo and at that time he hadnt sent back any Lenovo's yet …

so I bought a refurbed Lenovo

Lenovo bought out IBM but IBM kept 19% anybody know if that is still the case ?

My son did his research prior to heading off to university a couple of years ago and mentioned the MacBook Pro was a better buy than what he was looking for in a Windows built system. He is one of the few people I know where his partition is 90% Windows(Bootcamp) and for the gaming he likes; Alienware as an example does not give the performance and build quality the Mac does. He was back for the holidays and still mentioned the Mac was the best option even to date……He did mention heating was an issue when ran to max performance but a cooling pad solved it right away….

Generally speaking, 'high end' gaming laptops from companies like Alienware tend to be just as overpriced as Macbook Pros…. well, not AS overpriced. You generally pay a $500+ premium for the Alienware logo and some RGB lights.

The new i7 Alienware's start at about $1899 for a 17" full fat 1080p display (120hz I believe), a quad-core i7 6700k with hyper threading, 8gb of RAM and a desktop grade GTX1060 or RX470.

At $1799 Macbook Pro gets you a 13" Macbook with the touchbar, a dual core i5, 8gb of RAM and a Radeon Pro 450 GPU or Intel Iris 550 (both laptop grade GPUs).

They aren't even close in terms of hardware specs per dollar. Beyond that. You can bump the Alienware all the way up to a desktop grade GTX1080 with a 17" 4k display. They're completely different animals. Granted, you could probably fit a docking port in the side of the 17" Alienware that you could slide your entire 13" Macbook Pro into to charge it.

apparently lots of people switching from MAC's to Surface Pro's

I've recently heard stellar things for the little Surface Pro running CAD/CAM/Solidworks like a champ.

I'd love to see the Apple version of something like the Acer Predator 21 X

Dual Desktop grade GTX1080s in SLI.
Desktop i7 7820K (for non-Intel people, the K means it has an unlocked multiplier).
21" ultrawide 120hz curved panel.
Full mechanical keyboard with individually lit Cherry MX switches.
64GB of DDR4 RAM.
4 512gb SSD's in RAID 0 including 2 NVME SSDs and a 1TB HDD for mass storage.

Sure, you could buy a few Macbook Pros for 9K, but do they have eye tracking? It's only 20 lbs!

My ski bud owns a small town main street electronics store up here, he sez that he must turn over all product in the store 5 times a year to be sucessful, ask buddy if a product is any good he talks about how many he had to send back, so when it comes to LT's he found that good to best were Acer-Asus-Lenovo and at that time he hadnt sent back any Lenovo's yet … so I bought a refurbed Lenovo

Lenovo bought out IBM but IBM kept 19% anybody know if that is still the case ?

Bought the wife an i7 Acer 15" laptop a couple years ago. No problems, performs great.
Brand new was $1100.00 Comes with USB ports too!

I'd love to see the Apple version of something like the Acer Predator 21 X

Dual Desktop grade GTX1080s in SLI.
Desktop i7 7820K (for non-Intel people, the K means it has an unlocked multiplier).
21" ultrawide 120hz curved panel.
Full mechanical keyboard with individually lit Cherry MX switches.
64GB of DDR4 RAM.
4 512gb SSD's in RAID 0 including 2 NVME SSDs and a 1TB HDD for mass storage.

Sure, you could buy a few Macbook Pros for 9K, but do they have eye tracking? It's only 20 lbs!

You need a lifted F350 to drag the beast around.

You need a lifted F350 to drag the beast around.

Pffft. This will build, fuel up and drive your freaking F350 right through your grandma's living room bruh.

Thread bump 

Have a late 2011 MBP. 

At startup the MBP shows the apple logo and load bar. The screen is a mix of white horizontal bars across the screen. Load bar won’t progress to login screen. Goes grey/white afterwards. 

Is the GPU toast?