I havent always been Apples friend in this space, but this is just a note to say that my current MacBook Pro is by a wide margin my best computer ever. Also, tugboat pictures.
Why share?
Ive made intense professional use of computers for three decades plus. Im a connoisseur, if anyone is. If a computer makes me happy, its gonna make you happy. Everyone should share their expertise.
Why tugboats?
Because we went to the Vancouver Tugboat Festival and Im looking for an excuse to run pix and otherwise this is going to be a dreary wall of text. Tugboats are great!
Why Mac?
Ive often looked enviously at the Linux meatgrinders you can put together with hardware from Lenovo or whoever; more horsepower for less money, and its all Free Software. But the Mac has two killer features that I cant get along without: Adobe Lightroom and the Apple store.
Lightroom is obvious pictures shot in ultra-high contrast direct seaside sunlight need Lightroom love before they appear here but let me tell you about the Apple store. What happened was, the Mac frapped out with the weirdest symptom: Plugged into the Dell 4K via HDMI, it run happily. Standalone, it crashed instantly and colorfully.
This happened Friday morning. The next Tuesday afternoon I was taking off to do a couple of fairly substantial speeches in Denmark. So I dropped everything and hit the nearest malls Apple Store &kill me now, its iPhone 6 release day& Lines of joyless buyers-to-be snaked out the door. I bulled my way to the front and was a little bit rude and pushy to a Genius; I felt bad because the poor dude was stressed out. They didnt have any Mac types there but he got online and found me an appointment at another mall for 12:45 the next day.
The rest was easy. The second guy listened to the symptoms, said your video board is frapped but I have to run this test anyhow to prove it which it did and they took the computer and said no problem about the Tuesday flight.
An hour after I got home I got a call from someone at the Apple store. Um& your computer has this beautiful decal on it. Unfortunately, to do this repair, were going to have to remove it. I was baffled as to why, but needed the computer more than the decoration, so OK. When I picked it up he said we accidentally damaged one of the little wires while replacing the video, so we had to give you a new display. In fact, when I got home, I noticed a few subtle little changes, and Im betting they took my SSD and put it in a whole new computer. Whatever.
Guess what part of a tugboat this is.
Whats good?
The screen is huge (I run at full max-rez) and without visible pixels, the memory vast, the keyboard excellent, the CPU plenty fast, and everything Just Works.
Plus, compared to back when I got started on Mac, the open-source ecosystem is so much nicer. It used to be a day or two of work to get my blog-publishing machinery running on a new Mac. These days, it all comes in via brew or CPAN or vendor-supplied DMGs and takes maybe an hour, and remarkably little swearing.
Whats not to like?
The price; a maxed-out MacBook Pro is pushing $3.5K.
Also, its bigger and heavier than an Air. But really, not too bad; still lighter, I think, than the mainstream Macs I used to carry a few years back. And I guess the battery life isnt Air-class either, but Ive never found the need to run unplugged for more than two or three hours at a time.
Like all recent Apple laptops, its style is satin-bland. There hasnt been an interesting-looking MacBook since they phased out the black model.
Finally, youre not gonna get much use out of it in economy class.
What I worry about
Apple will eventually decide that nobody should be able to run software on Macs that doesnt come from their App store.