For a long time now (over a year), I’ve been thinking about switching from Windows to Mac. The major thing holding me back was the fact that a MacBook Pro laptop starts at $1800. That’s a LOT of money.
Back in August (or around there), I decided to just go for it. The main reasons for this decision are …
- My current laptop (a Dell Inspiron 1520 that is about almost 6 years old) has been getting increasingly unstable with every passing day. The video driver keeps crashing (but I think there might be something more than that that is causing problems). The display freezes up and requires a hard reboot or it just shuts the computer off … when I’m no where near it and haven’t used it for a couple days. It takes 3 hard reboots in order for it to be stable enough to keep running … until it decides to freeze up again. I’ve gotten a few BSOD too. One of these times, it’s not going to recover.
- I don’t want a laptop running Windows 8. I won a Windows tablet that has Windows 8 Pro on it at the end of April at a conference I went to. Windows 8 works just fine for the tablet, but it’s really clunky when I hook up a keyboard and mouse.
- I’m just tired of Windows. Period.
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I started doing some research before just pulling the trigger. I found out that those “in the know” were saying to wait to buy a MacBook Pro because Apple was supposed to be updating them in the fall. So I have been impatiently waiting since then for Apple to announce the new MacBook Pro models.
The latest rumors are that Apple will be announcing the new models at their event that is this coming Tuesday (Oct. 22nd) and that they will be available for order a few days after that. I sure the hell hope so.
But I’m concerned that Apple will only be announcing new models for the retina MacBook Pro (based on the rumors that I’ve been reading). I’ve decided on the non-retina version. Why? Well …
- I don’t need a retina display … I’m not a gamer or a designer. Yes … I’m a web developer, but my personal websites don’t need retina images. My work laptop should be a retina one for that purpose.
- The retina one doesn’t have a DVD/CD drive.
- I can’t upgrade the memory myself on the retina one … it’s soldered in.
- If I run out of disk space on the retina one, I’d have to buy a new laptop … it’s not possible to put in a new one since it uses flash storage.
- The retina version starts $300 more than the non-retina one.
I’m not sure what I’ll do it Apple doesn’t update the non-retina MacBook Pro. It really depends on what they do with the new retina models. If they come out with some sort of hybrid … a retina model with DVD/CD drive … then I *might* get the retina one. But those will probably start at around $2200. Even though I’ll be financing whatever I get (i.e. putting it on my credit card), that’s a LOT of money. Especially if I have to get a new printer and software.
I guess I just need to try to be patient for a few more days.
