Throughout college, including a 5 year stint working at Best Buy, I amassed several PCs - three desktops and three laptops. The 366MHz desktop was pushed to the wayside by a newer HP which was also pushed aside by an HP Athlon64, which was ultimately replaced by a dual core 2 beast of a custom build with 8GB of DDR2. On the laptop side there was a Celeron Toshiba Satellite usurped by an AMD HP Pavilion which failed to live longer than 3 years and was ultimately replaced by a Dell Studio XPS which rivaled the processing power of the custom built desktop and had a nice leather accent to boot ;) My house was in PC harmony as it should have been. Fully networked. Directories shared. Remote desktops enabled. I had no idea nor was I prepared for the dynamic shift that was going to be subtly introduced into my computing life.
A month and a half ago I was invited to a local Apple demonstration for corporate developers to showcase how the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad can work in the corporate world. Apparently a division of my company has been itching to be able to leverage the Apple technology for its "coolness" and ease of use appeal with its employees. From a development perspective it's tasty from a technological "coolness" factor. In any case some gears started turning and foreign wheels were put in motion amongst the developer team that was strongly suited and fluent in the PC world like myself. Personally I have obviously never owned a Mac, haven't used one since the first Gulf War in middle school, and have definitely never programmed in Objective-C or even knew where to start.
Fast forward about a month - I'm researching Mac Minis versus Mac Books versus whatever is out there in the Apple world and lightning strikes in the form of my wife picking up the 6 year old Toshiba Satellite, the screen going black, and never powering on again. Wasn't the hard drive, wasn't the RAM, wouldn't even post. It was like the Little Engine Who Could had suddenly run out of water, cracked his block and his tiny Celeron processor was suddenly silenced forever. Suddenly a personal Apple purchase was in play and surprisingly I had spousal approval for the venture. It may have had something to do with the fact that my wife would be getting a gigantic computing upgrade, inheriting the 1 year old Studio XPS with its dual core 2 processing, 4GB of RAM and 1GB of Nvidia love amongst other little bells and whistles.
Going along with the "custody agreement" decided for the Dell and taking into consideration that a laptop was being replaced a quick internal decision was made that a Mac Mini was eliminated from the runnings. The solid body aluminum chassis of the Mac Book Pro was much too alluring to pass up versus its non-Pro counterpart as I like a solid feel to anything I purchase whether it be power tools, laptops, or even a pen. It has to hold up to its eventual beating and not feel like it's going to fall apart. Size does matter as well - going from a 16" Studio XPS to a 13" MBP was easily out of the running officially putting me in the category of spending money I didn't necessarily have and possibly chopping off a limb to the 2" upgrade.
At this point I was in well over my head and was well into the $2200 range so I decided to say "screw it". Give me the i7, the full 8GB of DDR3, the 512MB Nvidia, and the 7200rpm hard drive. Oh, and don't forget the high resolution graphics. If I was going to dive into the Apple pool I was going to dive in head first.... with my wallet close behind it.
I bit the bullet, placed the order, and $2700 later I was transformed into FedEx tracking junkie watching my new Mac Book Pro being built and shipped from... China...? I can't say it surprised me but it caught me slightly off guard. I figured my configuration was somewhat common since Apple's choices were mostly vanilla but so be it. China it is and all I could do was wait.....
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