Since I'm solo tonight, and Simon is bed, I thought I'd camp out in front of my desktop computer and work on my next big project. I haven't worked at my home desk (as opposed to my day work desk) in awhile. Unfortunately, what I found was kind of a mess. Lovely as the screen and CPU might be on the giant 27" iMac, it does have a conventional, mechanical hard drive, which is super slow compared to the solid state drive in my laptop. This matters when your project involves about four gigs of data that you're importing and transforming. Plus, the VM I'm working on has about 10 gigs of dumps and temp files that need cleaned up, so basically I'm not yet getting anywhere.
Today, another rumor surfaced about the potential for new 15", and maybe even 17" MacBooks in the Air style... meaning very light, very thin, and of course containing solid state drives. The even more interesting part of the rumor is that they're going to include really high resolution screens. Think what that did for the iPhone, now scale it up to a laptop screen. Certainly the operating system can handle it. That would be amazing.
Right now, I still have pretty awesome computers. The iMac is just over two years old, and hard drive aside, is still a fantastic computer. My 17" laptop is almost three years old, a life expectancy you never had for laptops back in the day because they were always so underpowered. Since putting the SSD in it almost a year ago, it has been like new. Aside from a few minor cosmetic scratches, it's still in great condition.
If the rumors are true, and I can't talk myself out of it, I may consider the new lighter laptop. As much as I love mine, and as much as I've traveled with it, it's just so damn heavy. So if it happens, I'll take the SSD out of the old laptop and put it in the iMac, and see if I can sell the old laptop for a grand or so. It really seems to be worth that, still. As I learned with the Mac Pro I sold two years ago, these Macs have strangely high resale value.
I'm getting cheap in some aspects of my adulthood, but being cheap about your computers, when they're the primary tool of your trade, just doesn't make sense. It's like being a mechanic and buying your tools at Walmart. I dunno. We'll see how I feel if the rumors become reality.
No comments yet.