Re-reading things I wrote 5-10 years ago is a fairly humbling experience. I find that is don’t like how I sound much of the time. I don’t like how I wrote about my mother, I don’t like how I came across much of the time, actually.  Oh well, look forward I say…

Last night went to the Apple Store and picked up one of the new MacBook Pro laptops.  I got a 13-inch Retina display model.  I had really not been excited about getting this machine because of a number of factors.  First, it looks nearly identical to the 2008 model it’s replacing.  A little thinner, but other than that, it seems like there has been no progress on the form factor or design.  Second, there is no optical drive.  I don’t use optical disks all that terribly regularly anymore, but it still is mildly annoying.  Not the end of the world, as I have a couple of external USB drives I can use if I need to.  Third, no touch screen.  This is significantly more annoying.  I think touch screens on laptops are very nice.  Apple disagrees.  They’re wrong.  But, the screen it does have, with the Retina display, was another annoyance for me.  I felt like it added too much cost to the machine with too little value.  That is, until I spent a few hours using it and then turned to look at my standard-definition computer monitor and realized that everything suddenly looked like crap.  Retina displays are one of those things that you don’t know you want until you have ’em, I guess.  Final annoyance: non-upgradable RAM.  This is a PITA, but honestly these days 8GB of RAM (which is what I have in it) really does allow you to do just about anything you want.  There is very little reason to upgrade that over the lifespan (4-6 years) of a machine like this.

So, what do I think?  I named it WeeBeastie already because it’s so ridiculously fast.  I don’t want to look at the screen of my other computer because it looks so good, and I no longer feel like I want to carry my iPad around at work because it’s thin enough and light enough to be casually carried along with a notepad.  First impressions, then, are favorable.  Looking forward to putting it through more paces than just installing software on it.