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Date/Time | Activity | Location | Details | |||||||||||
| Jun 7, 2006 | 2:18 AM |
Int’l shipment release
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INDIANAPOLIS, IN |
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| Jun 6, 2006 | 2:02 PM |
Departed FedEx location
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ANCHORAGE, AK |
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| 12:48 PM |
Arrived at FedEx location
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ANCHORAGE, AK |
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| 11:04 AM |
Left origin
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SHANGHAI CN |
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| 11:02 AM |
Picked up
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SHANGHAI CN |
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| 8:55 AM |
Package data transmitted to FedEx
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The wait is over. I’ve decided to order my MacBook Pro. See the details below. Lenovo decided to drop Linux as a focus for the Thinkpad line. The lack of a well supported Linux/Unix distro further adds reason to move to Mac.
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Order Details |
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Product Name |
Product Number |
Unit Price |
Qty |
Subtotal |
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 |
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MBPRO 15/2.16 CTO |
Z0DL |
$2,899.00 |
1 |
$2,899.00 |
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With the following configuration:
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Estimated Shipped By: |
JUN 07, 2006 |
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Estimated Delivered By: |
JUN 12, 2006 |
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Recycle Fee |
$8.00 |
1 |
$8.00 |
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APPLE PORTABLE POWER ADAPTER85WUSA |
MA357LL/A |
$79.00 |
1 |
$79.00 |
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Estimated Shipped By: |
JUN 05, 2006 |
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Estimated Delivered By: |
JUN 07, 2006 |
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Well the 17″ MacBook Pro’s are starting to arrive. From the reports I’ve read the 17″ MBP lack the whine which appears in many of the early production 15.4″ MacBook Pro models. There are a few things that are popping up for the first time. Like the lid stays closed better, staying cooler and then there are those who think the 17 inch MBP is still stupid big. Hey what’s to lose… you get more for your money than with the 15″. Not to mention an extra 2 inches to help let all the heat out. Personally not sure how much fun it will be to travel with what amounts to a surf board of a laptop. I think it’s clear that the Thinkpad is out. Going to be either a 17″ or 15″ MacBook Pro. Few more mentions.
Apple released the 17″ MacBook Pro last Monday. In Part I of my Apple vs Thinkpad post I mentioned a few reasons why I’m strongly considering the MacBook Pro. The 17″ model adds Firewire 800, 8x super Drive, and obviously a larger screen. If Apple had just added the option for a speed bump in the Core Duo it may have just been the tipping point.
On a side note the MacBook Pro is seeing more and more applications get ported to native Intel and/or Universal support. Just one more feather in the MacBook’s hat.
I’ve been an IBM Thinkpad user for the last ~7 years. By and large they’ve been good to me. I think in those 7 years I’ve had 6 different Thinkpads. On average one a year. Only two failures to speak of; the first a hard drive failure on my T20 which had been whining for weeks so I had good backups. The 2nd a screen failure when an airport screener (one of those new anal post-9/11 types) dropped it taking it over to the bomb residue tester. So for 7 years of heavy laptop use not a bad record. However more and more I’ve got my eye on making the switch to Apple. Thinking back; my first ever computer that I did any *real* work on was an Apple IIe. Wrote some LOGO programs in an after school computer class.
Today my first reason to consider the Mac is that my day-to-day work can all be done(I think) without the support of Windows or Linux as my primary OS. Using Windows as my primary desktop for more than a decade has I’m sure left some scars. However most of what I do these days can be moved to just about any modern OS. Let’s see… Web based AJAX email, calendar, and contacts client. Thunderbird for offline IMAP mail. IDEA for software development. Firefox for web programming and surf’n the net. FTP, SSH, WinZip, etc. Lots of little productivity tools that can be replace in any OS. So for the most part being internet connected a bulk of the time let’s me do most things on the web.
The second reason is a common one echoed by geeks around the blog-sphere and the net. OSX is more secure, it’s Unix, it s *real OS*, it’s got nice UI candy, yadda yadda yadda. Nothing new there but for the most part I agree. The third and key factor is that Mac laptops have finally caught up speed wise with Apple’s switch to the Intel chips. For years the even the highest end Apple laptops suffered severe lags in performance compared to their IBM counterparts. For a developer or someone who uses a laptop for more than just a word processor and internet kiosk this is a huge deal. Before the MacBook Pro it just wasn’t feasible to use a Mac laptop as your primary machine if you wanted to get the most performance. The forth and final reason I’ve identified is that in my space and geek space in general an Apple is just cooler than a Windows machine. Ok so this is hard to prove and it’s a bit of a religious topic but I had to add it. So with that my delima begins. To Mac or not to Mac? Stick with Thinkpad and the new Core Duo T60’s or leave IBM (ahem.. Levono) behind and take the plunge with MacBook Pro?
I’m obviously not the only person looking at this issue.
What do you think?