Tag Archives: MacBook Pro

Then there’s the set up…

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I’m coming to you live and direct from a freshly unboxed 2013 MacBook Pro Retina. My assessment after thirty minutes of dinking around and loading software is that it’s a slick little machine. So far I’m impressed with what I’ve seen. Then again, the fact that it didn’t take half the damned day to boot up practically seems like a feat of magic at this point.

The first thing I noticed, of course (aside from how fast it is), is that the screen is absolutely beautiful. I knew it would be better than what I was use to, but I hadn’t realized just how much better it was going to be. Everything is a little “squished” since I’m coming from the 15-inch model, but after adjusting some muscle memory I’m sure I’ll adapt to it fairly quickly. Now it’s just a matter of setting it up the way I want it and making sure it can see all the network drives. Good times on this first day of a 5-day weekend.

Bottom line early assessment: It’s light, it’s fast, it’s a work of friggin’ art. Basically it’s everything that Apple said it was. If you find yourself in the market for a laptop and don’t mind paying the inevitable Apple Tax, it would be well worth your time to give the new Pro line a look.

Out to pasture…

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The reliability of my venerable Late 2008 MacBook Pro has reached such an unfortunate state. Despite my best efforts at salvaging the situation, it is time to retire the poor, battered contraption. Assuming all goes to plan, this will be the last post from an aged, and increasingly temperamental machine.

As much as I love new tech, parting company with this first of the aluminum unibody Mac laptops is bittersweet. You see, it comes with history. Or at least some personal history.

The first computer I ever used was an Apple Macintosh. There were six of them squirreled away apple_macintoshin a back room of the library at George’s Creek Elementary in the mists of pre-history (AKA the mid-1980s). I was probably all of eight or nine years old. We eventually added one at home too – my entry into having a real “personal” computer. That little beige box met all of the household’s computing needs for almost a decade.

The year was 1995. Enter Windows. I got my first Compaq desktop and never looked back. I was a committed Windows user from there on – building a series of progressively more powerful machines. That lasted for more than a decade of upgrades, new towers, and laptops until finally it ended with a puff of acrid smoke from the back of a Gateway laptop on March 20th, 2009.

Apple lured me back, not with a computer, but with a phone. I was so enamored with the engineering prowess in that first iPhone that I thought surely they know how to build a computer. And they did. The machine I’m typing this on outlasted generations of new computers, three major OS upgrades, and in almost five years didn’t so much as hiccup on anything I asked it to do. Right up until the point where it started choking on everything, of course.

Like every other bit of electronic kit, my ’08 model has reached a point in its service life when it is simply uneconomical to repair. In the finest tradition of American consumerism, I will therefore shunt it unceremoniously aside in favor of a newer, shiner model. But I won’t do it without posting one last blog from the machine that brought you every single word ever published on jeffreytharp.com, two ebooks, and spewed snarky commentary from one end of the internet to the other. It deserves at least that much for its years of good and faithful service.

The case of the mysterious disappearing blog post…

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Under other circumstances, what you’d be reading right now is a blog post that I lovingly spent 35 minutes crafting especially for this evening. What you’re reading instead is filler because my laptop once again decided to choke on all the awesome and pass out.

In fairness, I shouldn’t blame the laptop. It’s a 2008 model MacBook Pro, running with 2GB of memory and in service every single day that I’ve had it. I’ve been consciously ignoring the fact that it’s flaking out more and more often these days. My inner technophile just can’t bring itself to spring for adding more memory to a 5+ year old laptop. Despite my best efforts at triage, removing all but the essential files and programs, and generally treating it with kid gloves, the writing seems to be on the wall that it’s time to either spend the money on an elderly machine or retire it in favor of something new.

After six months of furloughs and shutdowns, I’m vaguely unsettled about dropping the cash, but at the same time having multiple works in progress residing on a machine that increasingly shows its age is untenable for much longer. Hopefully I can ease it along to Thanksgiving in the hopes that our friends in Cupertino are feeling extra generous with their holiday discounts. Until then, it’s daily backups and saving my work every 30 seconds.

Molasses…

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I don’t expect alot from my tech, but when I do tend to expect is that it runs quickly when I hit the on switch. Up until a few weeks ago, my laptop delivered as much zip and performance as it did the day I took it out of the box. Now it’s gotten so laggy that I can barely stand to use it. I’ve tinkered around with some of the settings, cleaned things up as best I can without making a major effort, and have pretty much been met with more chop and even less vim and vigor. I’ve got plenty of hard drive space left, sufficient RAM, and a machine that’s acting like it’s severely underpowered. Spending your off hours trying to diagnose a sick laptop isn’t the way you want to spend your time when you’re pretending to moonlight as a real life struggling writer. I need my laptop that just works, to just work and not give me a crap ton of problems right now. I’m going to try to nurse it through the next few days and the dedicate as much time as necessary this weekend to put right. Failing this weekend’s heroic efforts to make a repair, it might be time to bite the bullet and spend some of that tax refund on something shiny and new with some plussed up processing power.

With the impending launch of the 3rd gen iPad, it might be time to consider going back to an overpowered desktop for home using the iPad for all my mobile needs. Sure, it’s another one of those fancy first world problems, but it’s the one that’s in my face giving me fits right now, and that’s the one that always gets tackled first.