10.15.2008

I'm a PC... No Wait, I'm a Mac!

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!


3 comments:

Kacey3 said...

Congratulations and welcome to the fold. I was a SOLID PC guy when I first started working in our IT department and now I'm pretty much "the Mac guy." I'm loving it so much. I've got the Mac Pro as my primary system at work and the MacBook Pro 15" for home use.

I'd say that the 13" will probably serve you just fine, and like you said, you hook up a nice monitor to it and you won't even know the difference (it doesn't even have to be some overpriced Mac monitor, I use a 24" Dell monitor at work). If you plan on carrying that MacBook with you every day, or even more than a couple days a week, I'd definitely suggest the 13". I leave my 15" at home pretty much exclusively because its just a bit too bulky to be super portable.

Again, glad to see another convert. There is no shame in being a Mac person, so long as you don't let it go to your head and become some obnoxious Mac Elite.

Breeno said...

Get the mb pro. It's just right.

And agreed, they are just computers, no reason to suck down the Koolaid. Well, ok, they are -better-, but that's no reason to be -snotty- about it to those who haven't 'gotten' it yet ;)

Starrlett said...

And... decision made! I'll post the details.