Those with good eyesight will recognize a non-apple system in there. I used the Acer Aspire netbook (running WinXP) for mapping on several trips with it hooked to a Garmin GPS System providing the location information. When the Garmin broke, I started using an iPad with built in GPS as my main mapping system and I've been very happy with that. The poor old netbook would struggle when things got a bit demanding (I.e. Running more than one program at a time) and I haven't used it in awhile.
The Australian dollar has been going down lately, pushing up the price of imported electronics and also Dick Smith has said they will not be doing as many 10% off Apple days so when I saw that JB HiFi had a 10% off Apple computers, I just had to decide which of their laptops I wanted. The cheaper 13" MacBook Air was my first thought but after looking at the retina screens on the other two machines it dropped down the list. Couple this with the fact that the 10% deal only applied to the models in the shop and not the build to order computers which I would need if I wanted a MacBook Air with 8 GB of ram. So this ruled out the MacBook Air.
It was down to the new 12" MacBook and the recently updated 13" MacBook Pro with retina, both had retina screens (although the Pro's was slightly bigger) and 8 GB of ram and were roughly the same price ~$1620. The pros for the MacBook are it had a larger SSD (256 vs 128 GB) and was substantially lighter - in fact it is amazing how light this machine is. While for the MacBook Pro the main benefit was a substantially better processor, in case I wanted to do anything that required some computer power, like video editing. The MacBook Pro also had the advantage of having multiple ports and not requiring a whole heap of new adapters to connect to the single USB-C port of the MacBook.
In the end I went with the MacBook Pro with the smaller SSD (128 GB), because as a travel computer I don't need all the extra stuff I keep on my home computer so a small storage option wouldn't be too much of a problem. Then I went into the Robina JB HiFi store to see if they had a machine in stock and luckily they did. I think I confused the salesman a bit when I told him what I wanted and that I would take it now, he didn't even get a chance to get in his sales pitch although he did try to get me to buy some extras like extra warranty cover, Microsoft office, virus protection, etc. I suspect this is where they make their money when they have these discount sales.
Normally, when I have got a new Mac I simply hook it up to the old one and use the Migration Assistant to copy everything across to the new machine, so all my photos, music, bookmarks, etc. all end up in the right place but with 500 GB on my current machine and only a 128 GB SD on the new machine, this was never going to happen. The setup however was still pretty easy as once it was on my home wifi network I ran the system software updater to get to the latest version of MacOSX (10.10.5) and then connected it to my AppleID which let me download any Mac App Store purchases, synchronized my contacts, calendar and bookmarks. Then it was a simple matter to install Dropbox, Google Drive and Evernote which let me access the same files in the cloud and I was good to go. The boot time on this new machine is phenomenal and is not much longer than simply waking the machine from sleep, I think I will replace the old spinning hard drive in the iMac one of these days with an SSD. I'm sure there will be a few more things to get sorted out before the trip but I have a few months to work on that. 😄
No comments:
Post a Comment