Last night I ordered myself a new MacBook Pro, and in so doing I’m finally putting out to pasture the MacBook I bought on the first day the MacBook existed, back in May of 2006. It’s been a long strange trip, but it was time. Come to think of it, this might be the longest I’ve used the same Mac before moving to a new one in my adult life.
Why I didn’t pull the trigger sooner
When upgraded to the MacBook from my G4 iBook, it was essentially a two-generation leap thanks to the fact that Mac laptops were still stuck on the G4 even after the rest of the Mac line had moved on to the G5 generation. My MacBook was way more machine than I needed when I first got it, and as time went on I was able to keep it a step ahead of me by upping the RAM, then upping it again, and then finally upping the hard drive. About six months ago I’d finally pushed it to its limits for good.
But didn’t I already replace it once?
By the middle of last year I realized that thanks to my iPhone, I was using my laptop as a laptop pretty rarely. If I was going on a one or two day trip and wasn’t planning on doing any writing or production work while I was gone, my laptop stayed at home. So I decided I’d try getting a nice new twenty inch iMac as my new main machine, and keeping the MacBook around solely for those times I needed to do any serious travel. But after a few months of trying it that way I found that I’d had to move all my data back and forth between the two machines one too many times, and that I’d gotten way past the point where I could ever get used to using a desktop computer again (unplug it from the wall and it immediately turns off? traveling from one coast to the other requires UPS bringing you your computer?), and besides, I’m one of the few people who actually prefers a trackpad over a mouse, largely because using a laptop trackpad means you never have to waste time removing one of your hands from the keyboard in order to reach for a mouse. So I sold the iMac just before Macworld Expo and then decided to wait, as a precaution, until after the Expo was over before buying a new laptop. Nevermind that Apple just revamped its laptop line three months ago; you never know what Apple might have up its sleeve that time of year. So I waited until now.
Why I didn’t buy a MacBook Air
Being at Macworld Expo and seeing MacBook Air after MacBook Air after MacBook Air certainly left me with some Air-envy. After all, how can you not lust after a full-featured laptop that’s about as thick and heavy as a piece of paper? But a quick check of the MacBook Air’s specs (120 GB hard drive, 2 GB max RAM) tells me that it’s not a laptop that I can rely on as my everyday computer. After all, the 2 GB RAM ceiling on my aging MacBook is the primary reason I’m retiring it, and I need a hard drive at least twice that size. Even Apple doesn’t appear to be trying to sell the MacBook Air as a primary computer – not yet, at least. Here’s hoping the Air’s miniaturized specs catch up in a hurry so I can consider a future MacBook Air in the future. For what it’s worth, I love the idea of the optical drive being something you get to leave at home.
But even then…
A thirteen inch screen just isn’t getting it done for me anymore. I do most of my production work in Pages, and you can’t even get a single page of a Pages document to display at 100% within the confines of a thirteen inch screen – let alone trying to cram in all the palettes around it. Funny enough, when I was using the twenty inch iMac, I never did figure out how to use all twenty inches effectively. Even after a few months, I instinctively kept everything contained within the the upper-left two-thirds of the screen. But then I’m the kind of computer user who only wants to see one app at a time. If I’m working in one app, seeing other apps in the background is just going to distract me – if and when there’s something going on in one of the other apps that I need to know about, that’s what the dock is for. But the fifteen inch screen on the MacBook Pro is just enough to let me get comfy in Pages, which is the only app I use on a regular basis that I have real estate issues with. I know, because it was the very first thing I tried out when I played with the new MacBook Pro in the Apple Store last month.
So why not the seventeen inch MacBook Pro?
I just don’t need the extra screen real estate.
Did you get the MacBook Pro because it’s the only one that still has Firewire?
No. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: neither the new MacBook nor the new MacBook Pro has Firewire. Just because the MacBook Pro has a port that carries the brand name “Firewire 800” doesn’t mean a thing. If the vast majority of Firewire devices ever created can’t be connected to your port without buying an adapter, then your port is not a Firewire port, no matter what kind of misleading name you try to slap on it. Firewire 800 has zero relevance, there are nearly zero peripherals that are even made for it, I can’t think of a more still-born technology in recent memory, and I have no idea why Apple is still pushing such an obviously still-born technology as a misleading selling point. You can debate the merits of Firewire vs USB 2.0 until you’re blue in the face, but it doesn’t matter. Firewire died a long time ago; the only real debate is whether Apple killed Firewire the day it took Firewire off the iPod, or whether the Firewire Consortium killed itself the day it decided Firewire 800 would be physically incompatible with the original Firewire. Either way, buying a Firewire peripheral these days is akin to setting your money on fire (it’s just a matter of time before you upgrade to a computer that doesn’t have Firewire), and the phony Firewire port on the MacBook Pro is merely adding insult to injury for Firewire fans. If Apple really wanted to upsell me to the Pro, they’d have included an additional USB 2.0 port. Because regardless of what I think of USB 2.0, I can actually find peripherals that use USB 2.0. In fact I have eight or nine of them sitting here, four of which I keep connected at all times. So if anything, including an absurdly useless “Firewire 800” port on the MacBook Pro while only including the same number of USB 2.0 ports as on the regular MacBook, well that’s actually a disincentive to spend the extra money to buy a Pro. But in my case it came down to needing a fifteen inch screen over a thirteen inch screen and nothing else.
But there is the whole backlit keyboard thing…
This will be my first backlit keyboard. I can’t think of an instance where I’ve ever thought “I wish this keyboard was backlit,” but it certainly can’t hurt 
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