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.