MacBook Pro's, Way Improved But Meh

With the release of the latest MacBook Pro’s Apple has finally returned to some semblance of modernity with their product line in the laptop regime.  They have left their desktop line to languish at least for another six months though.  That makes my recent purchase of a Hackintosh Rig (that I admittedly still happily run Linux on without even considering the need to go back to OSX) seem like an even better idea.  Even with my embrace of Linux I still would have kicked myself if a dream iMac came forward, but thankfully nope!  Which brings me back to the latest laptops.  They are obviously a welcome upgrade to a laptop line that time forgot.  They have some very neat features.  They have the usual Apple Tax, in this case about $400 for a comparably priced Dell and about the same dollar price for a much better System 76 laptop.  But Apple has far better battery life than either of those two machines ever would.

Is it a great upgrade? Yes.  Is it worth the money?  Probably/maybe/depends.  Is it something I’m dying to buy?  No.  At this point none of the Apple laptop offerings are drawing me in.  My MacBook Air mostly gets the job done, even if it’s starting to show it’s five year age.  But the processor isn’t the thing that’s killing me, it’s mostly the memory limit when I try to run VMs.  So to spend $1500-$1800 just to fix that problem seems outrageous. At this point I’m going to go with my original plan: play around with my seven year old Dell running Linux and then give a System 76 laptop for a whirl.