I’m Now MacBook Pro-ified

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After seeing the MacBook Pro introduced over a year ago at the 2006 MacWorld, I knew right away that I wanted one. The cost was prohibitive for me, though. At the end of May, 2006, I was finally able to get a MacBook and then officially took the ranks of a Mac Switcher.

Going from a PC to a Mac was a quantum leap of effectiveness and productivity for me. It gave me an entirely new perspective on how I use a computer. Though I had been interested in photography for several years, it was after I began using a Mac that I was inspired to do more and get more serious about it.

Was it just because I was using a Mac? Not entirely, but the creative aura that surrounds the whole Mac experience really kind of got to me. I thought “I have a tool that a lot of creative professionals use” (or at least a tool related to the pro tools – the MacBook skimps on the video card and screen size) and so why couldn’t I try to do some of the same things? It was as if I had joined a creative community and therefore was inspired to be more creative myself.

I soon discovered, though, that the MacBook’s anemic video card, the Intel GMA 950 with its 64M of video RAM, just caved under the demands of image editing in Aperture. Adjusting colors, cropping, showing the loupe, adjusting levels would send both cores to 100% and I would get the spinning beach ball while it did its work. Aperture moves a lot of the processing to the GPU to offload the CPU, so it accentuates the shortcomings of any video card even more.

The 13 inch screen, while making the form factor of the laptop very nice for carrying around, limits the amount of stuff you can put on the screen at any one time.

It had gotten to a point that I was really slowed down in editing my photos and doing anything with them. It also just soured the entire Mac experience of power and elegance by having to wait so much for anything to work.

So, after more than a year of waiting, after making the switch to a Mac on a MacBook, I’ve taken the next quantum leap and upgraded to a MacBook Pro. I did a lot of watching the market on eBay, Craigslist and some other locations for used MacBook Pro’s – this took a lot of time and really distracted me from writing or doing much photographically over the past 3 weeks.

After a couple of weeks searching, and a matter of hours setting up Matt is now an extremely happy MacBookPro user.

I finally found what I consider a good deal on a 15 inch, 2.16 GHz core duo with 256M of VRAM great condition MacBook Pro. I’m writing this on it now as my first post from it and I’m ecstatic.

Today I worked just a little bit with Aperture – importing images from my camera, searching for photos via metadata search, scrolling through photos in the just the browser and with the viewer visible. Wow, it just sings. It’s like I just got in a sports car after driving a 1993 Corolla around town – on strictly the graphics performance anyway. Overall the entire experience on the MacBook Pro seems smoother, faster, more responsive, but the main difference is on graphics-intensive items.

And, the backlit keyboard is very cool!

As a side note, I used the Migration Assistant for the first time in transferring my info from my MacBook to my new MacBook Pro – that is a sleek utility. It transfers everything – every setting, every preference, browser history, all items in the Library, every application, etc. I don’t think switching data between 2 computers could be any easier! Score another one for Apple and usability.