retail therapy accomplished

[jazzfish]

A discussion with darkfyre_muse yesterday reminded me to take a closer look at the displays that were being offered. Turns out the only way to get a non-glossy display on a Mac laptop is to spend more money on a larger Pro. And poking at them in the store confirms that the antiglare is o so very much nicer on the eyes. Feh. I was looking forward to a slightly smaller machine but no dice.

So, yay for the Refurbished section of the Apple store, which has provided me with a 15" Macbook Pro that's slightly better than the baseline spec and has an antiglare display, for about what I could have spent on a baseline machine in the store today if they'd had one. (As of early this week $company gets an Apple discount, but it doesn't apply to refurbs.) Which is still more money than I've ever spent on anything that's not a car, by about a factor of four.

Oh well. In theory, and based on what I've heard from just about everyone who has one, assuming I like this computer it'll last me until at least the middle of the next decade.

Now to wait impatiently until the end of next week, and also to see how twitchy buyers' remorse makes me.

Comments

[vond.net]

My only comment is that you may, one day, want to buy a SSD. Otherwise, looks really nice!

Even with a SSD I dunno about it really lasting until 2025 though :)

[jazzfish]

Yeah, with the hard drive I feel just a little like it's 1907 and I've bought the best buggy whip money can buy, knowing that Henry Ford's auto-mobile is just around the corner.

And don't make me break out the "when does the millenium/century/decade really begin" arguments. :)

[plumbob78.insanejournal.com]

Oh, no, you're not one of those people who argue that 1930 isn't part of the thirties, are you?

[jazzfish]

The thirties actually began in October 1929, and probably ended in December 1941. I don't have any idea when the forties ended. The sixties started in late November 1963, and the seventies started in, mm, January 1973 with the Paris Peace Accords. The eighties, for once, began in November 1980. I don't have a good sense of when the nineties began; I was kind of wrapped up with being a teenager at the time. It seems facile to date them to November 1992.

And obviously the Zeroes began in September 2001. I don't know if they ended in 2008 or if they're still going.

(To answer your actual question, I'm mostly digging in my heels to avoid admitting to having made a mistake. :)

[plumbob78.insanejournal.com]

*goes shopping for a new timeline*

[rbandrews]

You will not be disappointed in the processor, at least. My week has been all about making heavy mathematical simulations run in faster than real time on machines exactly like that. Today we learned that our app runs, in a VM, at ~80% CPU utilization, on that machine, at about 10 fps. Which, when you consider that it runs at about 5 on an actual PC, and at about 3 on my dual-core MBP, is pretty impressive.

Unrelatedly, on Wednesday it ran at about 4 seconds per frame on everything. I've sped it up a lot this week.

[jazzfish]

I figure that hardware-wise it should keep me happy for a good long time. I've just in the past year started to notice the Dell running sluggishly, and it's, um, 1.6 GHz dual-core and may have less than a gig of memory.

On the other hand, I don't plan on ever doing anything really processor-intensive. This is probably about twice as much computer as I need. Which means that in about three years it'll be as much computer as I need, and in five it'll be slouching towards obsolete. I'm pretty much okay with that.

[rbandrews]

As a developer, I usually don't plan on doing processor-intensive things, I just screw up and get stuck doing them. : )

[jazzfish]

Heh. As a writer, I'm hoping I can navigate around developers' mistakes. :)

[rbandrews]

Incidentally, I'm kinda reconsidering my Macbook Air plan (I cannot bring myself to abbreviate it MBA). It's got the exact same processor as my current laptop, and a smaller screen. It's lighter and has an aluminum case, but so does the iPad (which I managed to fling across a car last night, and it didn't even appear to notice; that sucker's durable. I regularly toss it down like it's a magazine). So I'm kinda not seeing the point. Maybe there's a point in a Macbook Pro, but only if it has at least an i5 proc, because the speed difference is surprisingly noticeable.

On the other hand, I've been told that the speed difference given by an SSD is huge, and the MB Air is the cheapest thing that has an SSD...

[vond.net]

The speed difference is huge for booting. Speed difference for usage varies depending on what you're doing, naturally. SSD will *never* hurt though.

In the MBP line, Apple overcharges for inferior SSD's of a limited size range. Consequently when we bought Lisa's new MBP earlier this year, we just took the stock HDD and bought an 80 GB Intel SSD (more than she's likely to ever need) and installed it. Upgrading the RAM and/or HDD in the Unibody MBP's is pleasantly trivial.

One caveat to running a Mac on an SSD is that you might want to switch from the default hybrid sleep mode to traditional sleep-only mode. That's probably ridiculous though, since you'd have to be doing some huge number sleep-wake cycles a day to really significantly reduce SSD life.

[jazzfish]

It's good to hear that upgrading will be easy. I fully expect to want to put in more RAM at some point. I don't really see wanting a new hard drive (500 GB is, um, not quite an order of magnitude more than I've got on this laptop, and I'm only just now approaching filling that after three years) but I might want to switch over to an SSD at some point.

[jazzfish]

My almost wholly uninformed guess is that the point is for the Air to replace the entry-level Macbook.

[thanate]

for the record, I got my 15" macbook pro at a moment when they didn't believe in non-glossy screens, and in most of the environments I use it in, I don't find it nearly as irritating as one would expect. (The mall stores are pretty much set up to be the worst kind of environment you're likely to see for that.)

[jazzfish]

It's pretty horrid in the stores, from both a 'glare' and 'smudge magnet' perspective. And, I dunno. I'd rather not have to grit my teeth any more than I'm already going to for the software switch.

[thanate]

I do not mean to imply that I wouldn't prefer non-reflective; I just don't think it's actually as much of a problem as one might expect. (also, yay for being able to find one without)

[playing-tragic.livejournal.com]

I've made purchases from the online Apple store's refurbs/open boxed items without any problems. I love profitting from another's buyer's remorse. My Kindle and my Garmin GPS were both open boxed items I got for $80 - $120 less for basically brand new items.

Hadn't realized they discontinued the option of a glossy or anti-glare screen on the non-pro Macbooks. Use to have the choice for an extra $200 even back in the old iBook days, if I remember correctly.

The MacPro 15" is great, but they get HO. A lapdesk or something between it and your lap is strongly recommended.

[jazzfish]

I'm a big fan of "stuff someone else decided they didn't want." Thrift stores are among the best places to kill an afternoon. And I'd forgotten (until I went to log in to the Apple Store and saw that my shipping address was set to Blacksburg) that my iPod was originally a refurb as well.

Yeah, the antiglare screen's only an option on the 15" and 17" Pros, and then only with a resolution upgrade. Which I'm ambivalent about as well: I really don't want the text getting so small I have to strain to read it!

I'm mildly disappointed to hear I'll need a lapdesk or some such. It's /really/ nice to just plop down on the couch with the current laptop. Oh well. I'll get used to it, and it'll probably even be Good For Me.