It sure was a lot easier fulfilling my desire for new computers back when Toshiba, LG, Samsung and others used to send me review units. But after delivering a couple bad review scores I had to start self-funding my hobby.
Funny, when you face being stuck with a dog you quickly learn to bet on winners. In the notebook world there are just two; ThinkPad (not the other Lenovo brands) and Apple. These are the Toyotas and Hondas of the PC world.
For me, someone who always loved building up his own desktops and who measured value based on specs sheets, becoming comfortable spending a lot of money on a product designed and configured by someone was a long road. My instinct is to seek the deal and balance components such as memory, CPU, storage and GPU based on my own requirements. It’s great getting more than you pay for – who doesn’t love good deals? As an irrevocably converted Mac guy, deals are hard to come by now. Yeah, there is always hackintoshes but those are a risky proposition for a primary computer.
I like solid notebooks, and I like games. I don’t like gaming notebooks – I’ve owned two of the best and apart from games they never make me happy. Maybe if playing games constituted more than 40% of my time on a PC I’d be happier with one. But when they are not running games I find them big, chunky inelegant lacking stamina and loud. These requirements narrow my choices down to one line, the 15″ MacBook Pro. But damn those prices are insane. Steve Jobs probably thinks every normal person earns a few million dollars every year. Hey Steve, I am trying but I am not quite there yet. How about throwing me a bone?
Anyways, back to my story. I now have a MacBook Pro – one of the new ones. It’s 9600m GT GPU plays the games I love in Windows 7 at medium or high settings. Mac OS 10.6 is awesome! The build quality rocks – this things feels like it was sculpted by Zeus out of a boulder felled from Mount Olympus.
But holy shit did I pay a lot for it. Even with back to school incentives (piles of free stuff) and a small open box discount, this was a lot of money. Seriously, stupid quantities of money were dropped on this. I could have had two crappy plastic HPs with similar specs for this much. Or two of those swanky new Sony FW laptops that have AMD’s sweet new RADEON 4650 Mobility chip. But I know, trust me I really, really know that I would not have been happy. It’s taken me at least a dozen notebooks (this year) to get to this point. So, the only thing I hate about my new notebook is the price. But I will learn to live with it.
2.66 MacBook Pro (4/320) $2185 CDN was bundled with:
- iWorks09
- HP C4480 all in one printer
- Adobe Photoshop Elements 6
- Stuffit Deluxe
- Snow Leopard Retail Box
