My late 2009 13″ MacBook Pro, whilst still fully functional and working without problems, is beginning to show its age. Specifically the battery now lasts well under 2 hours and it is beginning to creak a bit using the latest versions of Lightroom and Photoshop. Less significantly, but still annoying, it takes a lot longer to start since I installed OS X Yosemite.
Whilst I am a relatively recent convert to Mac’s (2009 being my first foray into serious Apple territory) I have to say I’ve not really looked back since then. Whilst the issues of Apple lock in are well known I’ve always figured that it’s a price worth paying if you get stuff that just works rather than having to endlessly spend time fixing problems, downloading software upgrades to fix compatibility issues and of course fighting viruses and other malware. I’m therefore happy to pay the Apple premium if I get a computer that works and allows me to focus on just using it for what I want.
One of my criteria for a new laptop was to get something as light as possible. I do a lot of travelling and spend significant amounts of time on trains and in hotels. As my day job is not photography I want something that serves as a basic work laptop during the day (i.e. web based email, document and presentation writing and increasingly cloud based development) and allows me to do image processing at other times.
I was pretty much ready to opt for a MacBook Air seduced by the light weight and slim features but spookily just I was about to press the order button this post from Ming Thein arrived in my reader. Turns out Mr Thein had been similarly deciding on a new upgrade and pretty much had the same short list as me (except I was not considering a Windows machine). His decision was to opt for the 13″ MacBook Pro with Retina display on the basis the display was more suited to photo editing, the weight, whilst not the lightest, was a good compromise as was the processor and storage options (with suitable judicious ticking of the upgrade boxes). So what to do?
Well suffice to say I’m writing this on a 13″ MacBook Pro Retina with the base processor (2.7 Ghz), 16GB RAM and 256 GB SSD…
MacBook Pro with Retina Display (from Apple UK Site)
Peter Cripps | Photography 
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