After two books, thirty articles and four years I think it's time for a new Mac. For it's age the current one is still in good shape, but it's getting too slow for development tools to handle. And I find myself locked out of a lot of the cutting edge stuff because it's PowerPC instead of Intel. Thankfully Apple has finally released the new Santa Rosa based Macs, with the new LED backlit display. Should be very nice.
What's funny is that this time around I don't think I want the tippy-top of the line. I find my current 17" machine just too big really. I'd much rather have a 15". And I don't think another 0.2 GHz of speed is worth $500. I'd rather spend another $150 on a larger capacity hard drive on the slightly lower end model. Which means I would be looking at $2,040 retail, and I think I can get a good discount on that.
Then I could give my current machine a good scrubbing, blow out the keyboard, reset the operating system and give that to Lori. It should last her at least six months or so, and it will do all the stuff she is doing now on her current machine a hell of a lot faster. It's certainly not like my older 17" which was falling apart by the end, I've taken really good care of my current machine.
Posted by jherr at June 5, 2007 08:40 AMI too am looking at a new Mac Book Pro. My G4 PBook works fine, but uses the PPC CPU which Apple is no longer building into new products.
In regards to the two 15-inch models: The 256MB of SDRAM on the GPU is very likely a performance win for things such as Photoshop / Aperture / iPhoto and others. Much of the graphics processing these days is done in the GPU instead of the CPU. In many apps and use cases, GPU+mem_cache performance is more important than CPU+cache performance. Having 256MB of GPU cache instead of just 128MB is a win that is likely worth the cost.
My practice on laptops is to stuff them with as much memory as one can stand. You tend to get better disk I/O buffering. Running apps and widgets in the background tend to have less impact on interactive performance. I am tending towards the 4 GB of ram option.
There is an interesting option on disk: The 200 GB drive is attractive in terms of the space it offers, but it is a 4200 RPM @ 200 GB drive instead of the standard 5400 RPM drive @ 160 GB. I wonder if the extra 40 GB is worth the slower drive transfer rate? I suspect it is not.
There is a faster 7200 RPM drive @ 160 GB drive option as well.
I would not be surprised to find that battery life is somewhat inversely related to the drive RPM. So one of the extra costs of the 7200 RPM option is battery life.
BTW: Extra memory tends to improve battery life (due to the better I/O buffering that the extra memory gives you) as well as better performance.
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