Sunday 16 February 2014

Awaiting new MacBook Pro

Following some on-going slowdown and re-booting issues with my trusty 2009 iMac (Maisie) I have had to invest in a move to a MacBook Pro to give me a little more flexibility in where and when I can work at full tilt.

I chose the MacBook Pro over a new iMac (which are now fantastically spec'd machines) as although I work 9 to 5 in my home office I also tend to work away from my desk in the mornings from 6.ooam onwards and again in evenings til 9.30 or 10.00pm so to avoid having to always sit alone in my office I've decided to go for a powerful, fully capable machine that can move with me.



The 13 inch screen is more than enough (I'm used to working on my fairly low end MacBook Air 13") so I've gone for the mid level MBP Retina 13" with the 2.4 Ghz processor and 256 GB SSD but I have paid the extra to upgrade to the maximum 16GB of RAM to really add some torque to the processor and give me some future proofing. I've never had a Mac last me less than four years (and the iMac is now getting on for five and is still for the most part working OK) so I want to ensure I have a little more 'under the hood' for later in the computers life to prevent the slow down and rotating beach ball issues I'm having with Maisie and my Air.

The new machine, being fitted with upgraded RAM will be here in a week or so all being well but I will of course offer an update and my initial thoughts on arrival - I've never bought an Apple laptop from new before (the Air being a refurbished purchase a couple of years ago as a 'back up' to the iMac) and am quite interested to see how first the set up and then the enhanced RAM compare to the iMac which is an (admittedly older) dual core chip set with a slightly faster (again older) 3.06 Ghz processor but with only 4GB of basic RAM. There's also the issue of the SSD in the MBP versus the spinning disk in the iMac - I'm expecting some decent performance boosts from this feature alone. although moving from the 500GB storage capacity in the iMac might be an issue. For this reason I'll almost certainly keep the iMac as my main iTunes/home cinema repository. The joy of iCloud of course helps vastly here as I think large storage drives become less important over time.

I am re-tasking the iMac though - this will remain the main family computer, stripped of some of the more processor intensive apps and data I use for work and the MBA will move over to Localventure jr. - Ryan my 8 year old as his first Apple computer.

Watch this space for an update on the newest member of the Localventure family.

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