Goodbye PowerBook & Money, Hello MacBook Pro

Old Powerbook, new MacBook Pro.

After three wonderful and small screened years with my 12in. PowerBook, I decided it was time to hemorrhage some cash and buy a new laptop.

The old guy was reliable and wonderfully portable, but it was not suitable for my style of FPS gaming. The 80GB hard drive was continually almost full with years of digital photos and music. And finally, the battery gave up it’s ghost: 1% health, holding a 5 minute charge or less. Luckily, I found that my battery was covered under a recall for exploding batteries. I got a replacement in the mail that’s as good as new and less likely to blow up, a double win. I cleaned of my old files, dusted the keyboard, and packed it up to send to my sister. It will be a dramatic upgrade from her 7 year old iBook.

Now I’m the owner of a 15in. MacBook Pro, bottom-of-the-line edition: 250GB HDD, 2GB RAM, 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo, and more. I would have upgraded the disk and ram, but I wanted to save some Benjamins for living. When I get another job, I’ll probably bump up those specs.

The Apple Store salesperson took 10% off the total price. It’s called the “asking for a discount” discount.

I would normally not buy a first generation Apple product, but I thought it would be needed for imminent freelance work.* Regardless, I haven’t had issues.

So far the machine has been great. The glossy screen is luscious, and this thing is FAST. The additional real estate makes me actually enjoy opening up Photoshop and Flash now. I also partitioned the drive to run XP for gaming, fired up Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Team Fortress, and Portal and got some shooting on. It’s so nice to be able to do it all on one machine now. I feel sorry for the wear and tear I’m going to give to this hard disk, but it knew what it was getting into.

* More on the work story coming soon.