Hence, ‘extra.’
Fuck you, Joel.
Last word on the street said last Tuesday. That damn word on the street! Sure gets around.
Think they’ll replace the Powerbook and iBook at the same time, leaving the PowerMac as the last PPC based Mac?
Well, I placed my order today. Hopefully everything will go swimmingly. Thanks to everyone who put in their two cents about subjects pertinent to Apple… you know, as opposed to Joss Whedon.
Wait, which did you get?
I too am looking to get one of those macbook pros. And have been far too lax in my research (other than this thread) to commit just as yet.
I got a refurbished 15" Macbook Pro with the Intel Duo Core 1.83 Ghz processor. Also, I bought an extra gig of ram. It should absolutely scream. Honestly, I’m twitching - I’ve never bought anything this pretty before. Can’t wait to try it.
Great call on the RAM.
OS X needs a gig, minimum, to run effectively. My PowerBook has only 512, and I’m always thinking about how great it would be to be able to stick some more memory in it.
Then I think about how I’m going to have to get an Intel book soon anyway, and I table the RAM money.
The only bump in the entire purchasing process was what a pain in the ass Apple made it for me to give them $2000. Honest to god - I’ve never had an issue making a purchase shipping to an American address with an Irish credit card before, but it took four phone calls to resolve the issue. Tech support was friendly and perhaps overly apologetic, but never could help me. I finally had to stick it on an American credit card I haven’t used in like three years because it’s such a pain to pay off over here.
Here’s hoping the system is worth it. I’m a bit nervous - I’ve never spent this much on a piece of hardware before. It’s a business investment, but still.
You’re going to love it.
$2400 on this system a year and a half ago, and I couldn’t be happier with it. Never given me any shit, and I’ve even been a bad laptop owner by knocking it to the ground.
(Side note, my fingers actually typed “kicking” before I realized it wasn’t the word I had formed in my brain.)
Make that Tuesday (today). Specs look great. They stretched the standard 12" display into a wide format 13" (1280 x 800) panel. Uses the same CPU as the Macbook Pro, and comes integrated with the web cam and Front Row software.
It’s even available in black. Black is a bit of a price gouge though, $200 more than a similarly spec’d white model, with only the color and 20GB of hard drive storage separating the two configurations.
Bah, I’m not happy they put the Intel Integrated chip in there.
I was afraid they’d do that when the new Minis had it.
They look beautiful, but I’m glad I sprang for a bit more money. I hate the Apple’s smudgeable opalescence, so I’d want to buy the black model. But it’s a lot more, with nothing much to show for it but a black shell (which is actually strangely ugly in the pictures) and a slightly faster processor.
Meanwhile, add a couple hundred bucks on top of that, you can get a Macbook Pro with a hell of a lot more bang behind it… as well as those beautiful little extras like the backlit keyboard and autoadjusting screen. Graphics technically don’t matter, but I’m still happy to have a capable graphics card. And although I can’t see the technical specs, looks like it would have cost me more than the Macbook Pro to upgrade third party to 1.5gb of RAM…
I suppose if I change my mind, I can always return my Pro for a Macbook proper, but without having played with my Pro yet, I still think I made a decent choice. Time will tell, though.
I’m slightly disappointed, since I was hoping for either a 13" MacBook Pro, or for the upper-end MacBook to get close to the same amount of power, but the integrated graphics hurts a lot.
I can understand that they don’t want to go all Quadra again with every possible combination of options though, so when I replace my iBook I’ll probably ‘settle’ for a 15" MBP.
The only thing that intrigues me is that Apple is claiming up to six hours of batter life. Does anyone know what they claimed for the MBP upon release? That seems like a crazy amount of battery life for such a cheapish laptop.
Not really. The Core Duo CPUs are very efficient, though it should be noted that on battery they drop tend to drop in speed by about half.
So the Macbook Pro base model got upgraded to 2.0ghz with this announcement. Not a big deal, as I bought a refurbished 1.83ghz one… I can deal with saving $400 bucks on a laptop for that sliver of CPU.
But then I noticed on the refurbishment page that they dropped the price of the refurb model I bought by 100 bucks. So I decided to call them up, see if they could refund me the hundred dollars. I knew I didn’t have a leg to stand on, but it can’t hurt.
The girl refunded it to me in seconds. She didn’t raise a single objection. What great service.
Damn. Now I’m kicking myself for buying my iBook two months ago.
Welcome to the club!
Now please sit down while I fix you some of the Kool-Aid I have in the back. It’s great stuff.
Really.
OK,
I’m an idiot.
Where exactly on the webpage is the refurb option?