When, over three years ago, I bought a MacBook Pro with a 256 GB SSD and 8 GB of RAM, it was a bit difficult to justify the expense. The Windows 7 partition that I would run in VMware Fusion was only 40 GB and was mainly used for Microsoft Office. But over the years my development shifted from UNIX-style to Windows, and I ended up not only lacking disk space but also needing so much RAM that I spent weeks booted in the Windows partition. I expanded the partition to 60 GB (a painfully difficult process), but with Windows insisting that you can roll back every single security patch, and after installing no less than three different versions of Visual Studio, I kept running out of disk space again all the time. The few times I would run the Windows partition in VMware, allocating the much-needed 4 GB of RAM to Windows made the Mac side swap memory non-stop.
So, I'm now with a new Haswell-type MacBook Pro, with twice the disk and RAM. It's now cheaper, and I lost in the process an optical drive, an expansion slot, a USB port, a hole for Kingston locks, a few pounds and 2" of screen size. But then I gained an HDMI port, USB 3, an SD card slot, a thunderbolt port, the best computer screen I've even seen in my life, and of course 8 times the overall performance.
For securing the laptop, I had to buy a lock bracket from Maclocks, and it works well. It adds a millimetre or two at the bottom back, but I don't notice it anymore, and the elevation helps cooling the laptop.
Jumping in a "revision A" of Haswell-type computers from Apple could be quite a risk. Combined with the first release of Mac OS X 10.9 and Windows 8.1, things ought to be slightly broken for a little while. Indeed, there are a lot of people having trouble installing Windows 8 or 8.1 on those new MacBook Pros, as you can see in various discussion threads. I'm not in a rush in making my move to Windows 8.1 and Office 2013 since I've moved my previous Windows 7 partition to a "pure" virtual machine. While I didn't have any memory issue running Windows 7 in a VM, there were issues attaching my USB 3 external hard drive to the VM, issues that were resolved with an old USB 2 extension cable.
I haven't had the occasion to play a game to test the discrete graphics card, the last one Apple sells in a laptop, actually, but this new laptop is a work machine. Already I can tell this is a machine that can handle two or three VMs at the same time, and even if it were swapping memory the SSD is just that much faster that I wouldn't notice any difference. The difference in weight, the quality of the screen and the sheer speed of it will make a substantial difference in my work.
Unlike Dell laptops of Levovo ThinkPads, MacBook Pros still feel like a luxury item. Maybe its physical construction or its price is a self-fulfilling prophesy. Yet I was still annoyed when I overheard rich people at the Apple Store buying a nearly $3000 laptop just for the "Apple experience". From somebody that invest a lot of money and setup time on his primary work tool, all I saw was the futility and the wasted potential in this computer bought by a whim from this rich person. For me, having access to a computer as a kid was a turning point. For them, it's an expression of a "lifestyle". I compile and debug large amount of code in multiple operating systems. They prefer using Facebook using a high-resolution display. And Apple revels in that luxury consumerism.
I shouldn't complain. I don't buy electronics to brag about them. If consumerism ultimately brought down the price of the now-shrinking PC market, then I ended up paying less and being more productive. A for something that was cheaper than my previous laptop, damn it's an amazing machine.
Published on November 10, 2013 at 19:59 EST
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