So after much anticipation, many tireless weeks of spec checking and a whole bunch of money I was really glad to be on the receiving end of a brand spanking new 17″ MacBook Pro!
Although it has been less than 72 hours this is (so far) truly the most amazing piece of computer equipment I have ever owned, honestly worth every single cent! The initial setup was completely flawless and only took a few minutes. The graphics, resolution and performance are exceptional, in fact I haven’t even had to switch over from the standard “on-board” video card to the higher end controller yet, despite putting the GPU through a thorough beating, testing out the Quake 4 demo :P
The specs in this machine are as follows:
- Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T9600 @ 2.80GHz
- 4GB RAM
- 500GB 5400rpm hard disk
- 17″ – 1920 x 1200 native resolution
I plan to upgrade the memory to 8GB and the drive to the 7200rpm model sometime in the future.
The packaging ... please excuse the terrible quality of my 300 year old camera
Here are a few more (slightly better quality) pics:
My desk
A little closer
Yo dawg, we herd yo like laptop pics...
This should look familiar...
That trackpad really is awesome!
The rest of the network.
From the left, OpenBSD 4.5 gateway, proxy and firewall, ADSL router and OpenWRT wireless router on top of the 3com gigabit switch. The main workhorse (storage, virtual machines and build zones) is underneath that with a quad core processor, 4GB of RAM and just over 2TB of disk space in 2 ZFS pools (3 x 500GB and 3 x 640GB) running OpenSolaris and finally 2 x 2kVA UPSs.
#1 by Shaun on September 6, 2009 - 1:01 pm
Wow that is an awesome piece of computing right there. I’m not a fanboi of anything but I must say Apple does a great job of providing an excellent product.
The one thing that I cannot understand is why people bash (no pun intended) the Mac OS X. If only they knew that UNIX is under the hood and you can do so much with it.
BTW, good blog Greg. Will check it out from time-to-time. Enjoy your fancy new Mac Book Pro!
#2 by Tracey Allnatt on September 6, 2009 - 1:53 pm
Spoilt brat!!!! Enjoy!!!
#3 by Aragon on September 9, 2009 - 3:06 am
Bastard. :)
#4 by MootPoint on November 29, 2009 - 3:04 pm
Nice setup. I have been checking out the 27″ iMac i7. Having done some research on this stuff do you think it is worth the hefty price tag?
#5 by Greg on November 29, 2009 - 4:10 pm
I’m no Apple hardware expert, but it looks like a really nice buy and has pretty decent specs. Digicape are advertising it at R19999 for the 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. Considering I paid just over R5k more for the MacBook Pro with a slightly slower processor, half the disk space and same amount of memory it seems like a great purchase. Of course you can’t just sling it in a bag and take it off to work with you :P