Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

out of the box

So after about a year of dithering about it, I took the plunge this weekend and bought a new MacBook Pro to replace my aging Powerbook G4. (It seriously has been a year. Rob was going to buy me a couple accessories for my laptop last year for my birthday, but we deferred on those because I was in the market for a new machine. A year later…)

It took a bit of work to actually get the machine, actually. Thanks, perhaps, to a rumored shortage of parts related to the screen, orders of 15” MacBook Pros were taking 7-10 days to ship from the online Apple Store. Rob and I considered driving out to the Apple Store in Delaware to get the Instant Gratification of buying a machine at the store (and saving about $150 in the process by not having to pay for sales tax or shipping — Delaware being a sales tax-free state). Sadly, though, when I called the store they had no 15” MacBooks in stock, didn’t know when they’d be getting more and wouldn’t hold one for me when they did.

On Saturday, after calling around to most of the Apple Stores in the D.C. area (Clarendon, Tysons Corner, Pentagon City, etc.), I finally located one at the mini Apple Store in Bethesda. The man on the phone agreed to hold the laptop for me until the end of the day, and Rob and I hightailed it to Maryland to pick it up (and, thanks to a promotion for students, a (free) new iPod Nano for Rob with our purchase).

Onto the machine itself: It’s nice. Really nice. The glossy, backlit display is so bright — it’s really quite nice to design on. And I don’t know that I’ve ever been able to say that Photoshop “zooms” — but it really does. I’m really impressed with how CS3 performs on this machine. (Also: iPhoto ‘08 is fantastic.)

Meanwhile, thanks to the wonders of the built-in iSight camera, I’ve had a couple video chat sessions with my youngest brother Ross, who just got a 17” MacBook Pro for the start of college this fall.

I spent much of the weekend copying and backing up files, getting this new yet-to-be-named machine set up and preparing to say farewell to my old laptop. Aegis has a new owner now: I handed over the “keys” to Rob, who’s wiped the hard drive and made it his own. (New name: “hyper,” accessed over the home network with the in-jokey “hyper.local.”)