I have begun to process of going over to the dark side. I have ordered a Macbook Pro. I spent all night and all of the day until now researching which Macbook to order. After literally 5 hours of reading online articles, reviews and stats I drove to the Apple store in Southlake again (I went last night with Kelli). I played with the Macbook and Macbook Pro. I picked them up, shook them, practiced typing, opened and closed...you name it. I then asked an associate a lot of questions. I will say most of them really know their stuff. I have always bought mid-range laptops with integrated video cards. This Macbook will be my 3rd laptop and the first with a dedicated video card. This is what I spent most of the time pondering. Would I REALLY use the dedicated video card? Do I need the extra horsepower? After all was said and done I decided I did need the little extra oomph. Going with a Macbook pro over a Macbook did have a huge...yet small compromise. Macbook's have a coach friendly 13.3 inch screen while the Macbook Pro has a 15.4 inch screen which isn't "coach" friendly. Sitting in coach with a screen larger than 14 inch means when the jackass in front of you leans back suddenly you can either crack your screen if its in the "wrong" spot or forget using it as it's tilted back too much. I thought long and hard. The pros of a dedicated video card outweighed the negative of a larger screen. Plus I get first class 40% of the time anyway where screen size is not an issue.
Where did I buy the Macbook pro? Well I get a nice discount from Apple thru American Airlines. The price was nice...but after taxes the price is just $9 less than the pre-discount price. Boo taxes! So I looked around. I ended up buying from MacMall.com. The price is $250 less than Apple.com after discounts and a $150 mail in rebate. I also get a HP all-in-one printer with a fax machine for $20 (after rebate) and free Parallel software which allows me to run Mac OS and Windows Vista AT THE SAME TIME! Heck yeah. This will be a no compromises laptop. I can run Windows when I need to and still learn the Mac OS. Who knows...our next computer might be an I-Mac!
For those interested here are the specs from my new Macbook Pro
- 15.4-inch (diagonal) widescreen LED-backlit display
- 1440 x 900 resolution
- 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor (Penryn); 3MB shared level 2 cache
- 2GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM
- 200GB 5400-rpm SATA hard drive
- 8x slot-loading SuperDrive (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
- NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 256MB GDDR3 memory
- Built-in iSight video camera
- Built-in Airport Extreme Wi-Fi 802.11n
- Built-in Bluetooth 2.0+EDR
- Built-in Gigabit Ethernet
- Built-in Stereo Speakers
- DVI or VGA adapter included
- Built-in Dual-Link DVI Support
- ExpressCard/34 expansion slot
- One Firewire 400 port
- One Firewire 800 port
- Two USB 2.0 ports
- Kensington cable lock slot
- Backlit keyboard and ambient light sensors
- Solid-state trackpad with Multi-Touch gesture
- Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard
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