My my ! Its been a few days since I had the chance to write a little, but life is getting in the way of all the stuff I would like to do. Long days at work and home renovation are 2 time consuming things to have on ones plate. As we lay down new flooring in the several rooms, moving stuff around feels like playing tetris with your own furniture. But inbetween working, painting, sanding, flooring and shlepping i’ll try to get out a little scribble.
Reason for WANTING to type up a little article is because of the brand spanking new Mac that is sitting right in front of me. Every few years ( or at the end of every year to be honest ) we browse through the house and look at what tech-stuff is ready to be sold off. Hanging on to gadgets I don’t use has never been my thing. I have a sacred “three month rule” that says : If a gadget or gizmo is lying around for more then three months unused : sell it. With out Macs that is of course a different story. Both the laptops and the desktops get used daily , but still : they age. And because of this , we need to sell them off in time before they drop too much in value. One of the macs that came into this zone is my 15.4 inch Dual Core macbook Pro. It was the second 15.4 inch Macbook Pro i’ve ever owned and the first to carry the unibody form factor. And over the last 2 years I have enjoyed using it very much. Due to its size it has not ‘traveled’ a lot. The large screen and high price point make it a laptop that is a little too ‘precious’ to throw into just any backpack. But it made a wonderful mobile powerhouse for me during its usage.
My plans to get a new Mac got sped up when I found a folder of the local MediaMarket ( Kinda like a Best Buy in the US ) that had a special on Macbook Pro’s. If you traded in ANY old laptop or desktop you got 100 euro’s of the price of the macbook AND 50 euro’s worth of Appstore credit. I found a buyer for my Mac the same day ( I have a waiting list of friends who are always interested in top-notch second hands from the Knightcastle) and hoppa .. time for a new mac.
So after endless debating on Google+ and with my father in law (an Intel expert) about wether to get the I7 or the I5, I decided to go with the 2.4 Gighz, I5 , 13.3 inch Macbook Pro. Why ? Several reasons.
Form factor. As I said : 15.4 inch is just too big to carry around. I had been relying on our older 13 inch Macbook air for my “mobile blogging operations” but it is lacking when it comes to storage space and muscle power. Combining both in this new Macbook air seemed logical.
Processor : There is not a lot of difference between the 2.4 gighz I5 and the 2.8 gighz I7 when it comes down to “average use”. I’m not gonna multithread 400 processes and the times i’ll be encoding HD videomaterial on this baby are limited. So I will leave the I7 option open until I go for a new Imac. The 200 euro’s saved will be spent differently by upgrading the RAM from 4 tot 8 gigabyte. Kingston High Value DDR3 1333 Mhz 4 GIG Ramsticks are 36 euro’s a pop so i’ll pop over to germany next week to pick those up. (never buy a ram upgrade from Apple : There is no such thing as ‘apple ram’ , any ram will do as long as you swap out ALL the modules).
Harddrive : This is a little bit of a bummer on my new Macbook pro. The reason Apple decided to go with the 5400 Rpm drive is beyond me. With my previous macbook pro I decided to go for a 7200 RPM drive replacement when I got it. At the moment i’m tempted to do the same BUT there is also the option of OWC Data Doubler from Macsales.com. The idea is simple : Open up your mac, remove the optical drive. Replace it with an adapter that holds a 128 gig SSD Drive. Make that drive your system drive, make your OTHER (original) drive your data drive and Hoopla : Macbook air speeds with macbook Pro storage. The kit costs around 229 dollars and i’m seriously considering it.
I’m pretty pleased with the mac right now, ( I call it ‘Whoooo ! ) but I know that after the upgrades i’ll probably call it “Whoo-Haa'” for the incrimental increase in awesomeness. After I de-lionised the interface (switching off all the Lion swipes and gestures) it felt pretty good to work with. And for this price point I would not recommend anybody to get a PC. 1199 is a lot of money, but with this Macbook Pro its probably your best bang for the buck.
Links : OWC Data Doubler.