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

[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.