Having worked my way through numerous laptops over my working life I had been very happy with a small number of vendor products. This blog has a no-name-and-shame policy but some laptops I have used have been hell. And rhymed...
I was always a big fan of IBM Thinkpad and Toshiba. Since Lenovo acquired the Thinkpad business the quality has dropped so I am not sure I would invest in Lenovo product. Toshiba seems to have gone down the big screen/touch screen route which is fine for fun but not so good for the road warrior carting round a laptop for business.
So, I decided to make a bit of a change and get an Apple MacBook Pro. The non-retina display 13" is slightly hidden on the Apple.com website but it's in there. I upgraded the CPU to the 2.9Ghz i7, upgraded the chip memory to 8GB and took the hard drive to 1TB of old-fashioned spinning metal.
So - first impressions. It's quit a nice bit of kit. Due to work reasons I need to get office and Visual Studio working so I put Windows 8.1 Pro on the bootcamp partition. I gave that 200GB and installed Office Professional, Visio, Project and Visual Studio. Not a huge fan of the new look and feel for Windows 8.1 Pro but it'll be ok for what I need.
I did always want to get one of these Tadpole Viper but have never really found a reason to explain that to management. I did once put together a business case to buy one of these Tadpole ALPHAbook but never did get the purchase order signed off.
I was always a big fan of IBM Thinkpad and Toshiba. Since Lenovo acquired the Thinkpad business the quality has dropped so I am not sure I would invest in Lenovo product. Toshiba seems to have gone down the big screen/touch screen route which is fine for fun but not so good for the road warrior carting round a laptop for business.
So, I decided to make a bit of a change and get an Apple MacBook Pro. The non-retina display 13" is slightly hidden on the Apple.com website but it's in there. I upgraded the CPU to the 2.9Ghz i7, upgraded the chip memory to 8GB and took the hard drive to 1TB of old-fashioned spinning metal.
So - first impressions. It's quit a nice bit of kit. Due to work reasons I need to get office and Visual Studio working so I put Windows 8.1 Pro on the bootcamp partition. I gave that 200GB and installed Office Professional, Visio, Project and Visual Studio. Not a huge fan of the new look and feel for Windows 8.1 Pro but it'll be ok for what I need.
On the Mac partition I installed Virtual Box. Within Virtual Box I installed another instance of Win 8.1 Pro. I then cloned that virtual hard disk (VHD) and now have a sandpit in which I can play around with various tools I download from the internet. I also created further VirtualBox installs of Ubuntu and Windows Server 2012.
In order to use Spring Tool Suite you need Java. But OSX Mavericks 10.9.2 does not include Java. So a download is needed to get it running. You can see that Apple is trying to create a software+hardware+services walled garden and they do an excellent job of pushing folks to go "all Apple" in order to make it work easily.
As a simple example of this, I have a couple of Toshiba USB3.0 1TB portable hard drives. These take slightly more than the mandated power load. Every other non-Apple computer I have used will push out enough power to get the Toshiba HDD to work. But MBP will not. A quick google shows a theory that this issue is caused because Apple do not want to push out enough power to charge up non-Apple devices. Whereas if you connect an Apple iPhone via a lightning-to-USB adapter cable the MBP will push out enough power. Frustrating. A powered USB hub resolved the issue but it's clearly a design decision made to push more product.
For a hobby project for fun I will install an instance of QNX and a Blackberry playbook emulator. QNX is a true real-time OS that was acquired by Research In Motion (Blackberry). Unlike most operating systems QNX has been used for nuclear power plant control. It's also used to underpin a lot of automotive control systems - a quick google shows you how prevalent QNX is. My plan for this will be covered in another post.
I also picked up an Apple TV device and a cheap wireless router. This allows you to use a TV as a monitor.
Next steps for the MBP:
- Get Apple Xcode up and running and having a look-see about what it can do.
- Have a look at Spring Tool Suite on Mac. I have never developed on an Apple Mac so it will be interesting to see how well it works.
- See how I can get my HD video camera files onto the MBP hard drive
Longer term:
- When I can get a decent 1TB or more SSD drive I will install that - for the time being I will stick to old fashioned HDD. Apple don't sell an SSD with more that 512GB but that's no use if you are running multiple operating system instances within VirtualBox.
- Get a decent NAS to collect media and code.
So - what's the conclusion? Apple MacBook Pro 13" is a nicely made piece of kit. Has a satisfying solid feel. But overpriced - the Apple tax is real (anyone remember the uproar about the Windows tax?).
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