That’s right folks, I did what most developers who use Microsoft as their main development platform would never do…
I bought a brand new Early 2011 MacBook Pro.
Let me provide a little back story to this purchase decision. I used a Titanium PowerBook G4 back in college and love the machine. Overall, I’m a huge fan of OS X. However, after 3 years with the machine I switched back to a Windows desktop. Primarily because I could build a machine with lots of power for cheap. I used that machine for 5 years until eventually it just became to slow for modern software. I replaced that machine with an ASUS G51VX. I chose the G51VX because I wanted the horsepower of a desktop in a laptop so I could carry it with me to work for meetings, on trips, etc. However, after less than two years of ownership both the Hard Drives failed, and within a month of each other.
Granted, Hard Drive failures happen. However, they shouldn’t happen so soon and they should happen so close together. The laptop had Seagate drives, so I’m now four for four in Seagate HDD failures. There will never be a 5th… I replaced the drives with two Western Digital 750GB Scorpio Black drives. And restored Windows, and experienced issues with the installation so I formatted and restored again, and then again. See, I couldn’t get Windows update to run. I would receive an error the service wasn’t running, even though it was each time I re-installed. I suspected at this point it was a driver issue. So the final restore I installed each driver one-by-one and tried Windows Update until, lo-and-behold I received the error message.
The culprit? I bad HDD controller driver. So, I scoured the Internet and finally found a working on on Intel’s website. I installed the new driver and everything was good. The downside, I just spent 2 weeks and several late nights restoring the laptop. So, I decided, my time was worth more than that and I’d move to a historically more reliable platform. I tried Ubuntu for a while and though I love the platform, most software that I use just doesn’t support it but does support Mac. So here I am, with a shiny new laptop.
The specs:
- 15″ High Resolution (1680×1050) Glossy Display
- 2.3Ghz Intel Quad-Core i7 CPU
- 8GB DDR3 1333Mhz RAM
- 500 GB 7200 RPM HDD
- The rest of the specs are stock
One huge benefit, a high performance machine with a high performance GPU that has great benchmarks but still get up to 7 hours of battery life under light usage, weighs under 6 lbs, and is less than 1″ thick. I did my research the only machines that offer the same performance with the same portability and battery life but run windows cost roughly the same as an Apple.
Oh and another thing, I have an idea for an application for iOS and Mac OS X. Now that I have a Mac I can take some time to learn XCode and OS X and iPhone development and see if anything comes of it.
Here’s a picture of the new laptop.
