I’d been eagerly awaiting the new line of MacBook Pro laptops from Apple so that I could replace the one I’d used while at IBM with one of my own.
I’d expected the faster processors, of course, and the automatic swap between the graphics processor wasn’t a huge shock, but I was surprised to learn that they’d added a 15″ model with more pixels onscreen. One of the few complaints I had in moving from my old ThinkPad to the MacBook Pro was the loss of vertical screen real estate — 900 pixels just aren’t that many, especially when using Lotus Notes. Lotus Notes isn’t a consideration now, of course, but I think it would be nice to have more vertical room anyway.
So I made a trip to the Apple Store to look at the new systems, especially the new display — but they didn’t have any on the floor yet! The manager told me that the first they knew of the machines was when the truck arrived, and that they hadn’t had the chance to update the floor displays. But she said they should have them out tomorrow — I’m hoping that includes the hi-res 15″ model.
I’m also undecided about the disk — the machine comes with a 5400rpm disk, but there’s an inexpensive upgrade to 7200rpm, or a rather pricey upgrade to SSD. I think I should pass on SSD at this point in the cycle, but 7200rpm is appealing — I just wonder about the impact on battery life. And I have to decide between the i5 and the i7; I’m leaning towards the i5 on the basis of price/performance.
Advice is welcome!
Consider getting the 7200RPM disk, waiting 12 months, and then buying a third-party SSD. By then it’ll be time for a nice clean OS install anyway, and the SSD will be much cheaper (duh).
{inw}
That sounds like a plan.
I agree. I’m not sure what the 7200RPM will do to battery life. I upgraded my wife’s old 17inch MBP with more memory and a 500GB 7200rpm harddrive and her battery life didn’t seem to get any worse (it was already pretty bad). Did you read the fine print on apple’s website regarding battery life? ” Battery life depends on configuration and use. See http://www.apple.com/batteries for more information. The wireless productivity test measures battery life by wirelessly browsing various websites and editing text in a word processing document with display brightness set to 50%”. Intel i5 is a great choice. Yes upgrade to a SSD later on, it will be like a whole new laptop after that.