{"id":592,"date":"2009-07-31T12:30:50","date_gmt":"2009-07-31T02:30:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/?p=592"},"modified":"2009-07-31T11:14:01","modified_gmt":"2009-07-31T01:14:01","slug":"macbook-pro-why-did-it-have-to-be-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/2009\/07\/31\/macbook-pro-why-did-it-have-to-be-you\/","title":{"rendered":"MacBook Pro, Why Did it Have to be You?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Apart from work issued laptops I&#8217;ve never really owned my own personal portable computer. A couple years back I did purchase a $300 laptop off ebay in the hopes of transforming it into a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Carputer\" target=\"_blank\">carputer<\/a> however the unfortunate happened and it gave up the ghost a couple weeks after I bought it. Since then I&#8217;ve shunned most laptops as I&#8217;ve never had a reason outside work to have one, but all that changed recently when several different cosmic forces conspired against me to push me towards my ultimate decision, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.apple.com\/macbookpro\/\" target=\"_blank\">MacBook Pro<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Coming up at the end of the year I&#8217;m getting married (yay!) to my lovely fiance. We&#8217;re going on our honeymoon to location X (no one but me knows where it is, ha!) and if it&#8217;s one thing that I&#8217;ve learnt from my friends who&#8217;ve travelled the world is that pictures and memories will only take you so far. When the first of my group of friends jetsetted overseas he was presented with a travel journal to chronicle his trip. This was long before any of us considered blogging or similar as it was still really in its infancy back then. So I resided myself to get some kind of portable computer to take along with us, not for entertainment just to write in of a night time. Hence I decided that I needed something that was light and compact with a decent battery life. At this point in time I was looking pretty squarely at a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Netbook\" target=\"_blank\">netbook<\/a> as they tick all the boxes and are cheap to boot. I was thrown a requirement curve ball not too long afterwards however.<\/p>\n<p>Enter my budding web application <a href=\"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/geon\" target=\"_blank\">Geon<\/a>. After showing it around to everyone the consensus was that the end game I was aiming for would be shot in the foot if I didn&#8217;t target the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.apple.com\/iphone\" target=\"_blank\">iPhone<\/a>. Since I can write off one phone a year as a business expense the prospect of buying an iPhone isn&#8217;t such a bad prospect for me (and really if I don&#8217;t want to use it my fiance will <em>gladly<\/em> take up the opportunity) so I&#8217;d resigned myself to getting one once I had matured Geon to a level where I felt iPhone uses would want it. Thinking that such a widely used device would have development environments available for all platforms I set off looking for one so I could have a play.<\/p>\n<p>Oh how wrong I was.<\/p>\n<p>Turns out the <a href=\"http:\/\/developer.apple.com\/iphone\/\" target=\"_blank\">iPhone SDK<\/a> is only available to those who have a Mac to develop on. There is talk of some people running it on Windows using some creative hacks however it doesn&#8217;t appear to be all roses for them and 99.999% of the resources I found online make no mention of anything else other than a Mac environment. The cheap option here would be to buy a second hand mac mini but since I&#8217;m in the market for a Mac of some description and a laptop it&#8217;s going to be better to get something that can cover both requirements.<\/p>\n<p>So I&#8217;ve resigned myself to get a MacBook Pro and whilst I initially struggle with the idea of shelling out so much cash for a laptop I&#8217;ve come to appreciate what I&#8217;ll end up getting. For the same specifications the MacBook Pro is incredibly small and light. Couple that with the new battery which lauds 8 hours of life (I&#8217;d be happy with 4\u00a0 when specs like it has are involved) and it&#8217;s a pretty decent machine. Plus thanks to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.apple.com\/macosx\/what-is-macosx\/compatibility.html\" target=\"_blank\">Boot Camp<\/a> I can happily hide MacOS away if I want to delude myself into thinking I bought a silver Dell or something for a while.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m even slightly tempted by the 128GB SSD upgrade option for $288. That&#8217;s not too bad with all things considered.<\/p>\n<p>Now where did I put that turtleneck&#8230;&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Apart from work issued laptops I&#8217;ve never really owned my own personal portable computer. A couple years back I did purchase a $300 laptop off&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[146,485,5597,484,483,482],"class_list":["post-592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech","tag-apple","tag-development","tag-geon","tag-iphone","tag-laptop","tag-macbook-pro"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/ppBqt-9y","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=592"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}