I've done a lot of research and thinking and pro-con-ing over the last two weeks, and now that Apple has finally shown its hand, I'm close to a decision.
Yes, I'm joining the Apple Cult, after many years of wistful envy. Alex getting a MacBook Pro for his work machine, which often comes home with him, pretty much sealed the deal. For years, we've been trying to decide on some kind of primary media server and content backup system, and about all we ended up with were a few small external hard drives that I remember to backup to about once every six months. But with Time Machine on his MBP, as soon as Alex boots up, his machine is auto-synched and backed up to our external hard drive.
Um... sign me up.And add to that:
- If I use a non-Mac laptop and mp3 player, we have to rip all our content in more than one format. Or we rip it all through iTunes as mp3s--which I started doing, and now my non-Mac laptop is putting music in three different places: iTunes, Vista's "Music" folder, and the old-style Windows "My Music" folder, which I have unsuccesfully tried to nuke several times. This makes me crazy.
- iPhoto, and Cover Flow, and everything else about Macs that is so darned gorgeous. Gimme.
- Adobe CS4 is available for ridiculously dirt cheap both through my educational discount, and another $300 off for buying it with a MacBook or MacBook Pro. Again: Gimme.
- LED screen.
- Huge trackpad.
- Illuminated keyboard.
- Alex and I compared file-loading on both our machines last night. Yeah. Wow.
- And lastly: the things automatically hibernate when you close them! This may seem a silly kind of a feature, but if you knew the amount of time I spend every evening booting my laptop up, waiting for everything to load, then waiting for Firefox to show up... yeah. And then I have to wait again, whether I hibernate it or shut it down. And hibernating it screws up my machine after about a day.
Alex has hibernated his Mac, without shutting down, for at least a month.
GIMME.All that to say: tonight at the Apple store, I hope to make my final decision. It's come down to this:
13" MacBook, 2.4GHz, +4GB memory, 250 GB hardrive
vs.
15" MacBook Pro, 2.4GHz, +4GB memory, 250 GB hardrive
The
only real differences between these two machines are: screen size/resolution, weight (the 13" is a full pound lighter), better graphics card option, and the 15" has an ExpressCard slot that I could put a SD card reader into. But for the
$400 price difference, I'm leaning toward that 13"! I can always hook it up to a monitor or two at home/work if I find I'm needing more screen real estate.
But any final Mac-user advice would be appreciated!
