1. BluRay – 25GB & 50GB recording capabilities for completely backing up my hard drive on 2 BluRay discs. Sony just put its $3,499 BluRay laptop up for pre-release sale, so Apple should follow by January MacWorld, at the latest.
2. Robson – 64MB-4GB Flash memory for booting in seconds, rather than half a minute. Availability: next year.
3. 802.11n (forgot this one!) – The promise is for bandwidth rates of up to 540mbps, which is cool – but not that useful, since we’re limited by the speed of the cable/DSL connection, but not bad for internal data transfers. The important piece is the 2-8x increase in range. Sweet.
4. Maturity – In the 5 months since the Pro came out, and Apple has had more than 4 revisions (2 months ago, they were on Revision E). Over time, Apple works out kinks in each revision – such as fan noise.
5. Important Universal Binaries – A lot of my company’s work requires the Adobe Suite, and the Universal Binary that will come with Adobe CS 3 won’t be available until 2007. Speed is your friend, and running CS2 on a 2 Ghz MacBook under Rosetta is 60% slower than on a 12” Powerbook. Blechhh.
6. Virtualization – VMWare is releasing its software in the next 6 months for OS X, although Parallels just went Gold. I’ll look out for reviews of the last version, although the last release candidate wasn’t stable.
7. Buyer’s remorse – I bought my 17” PowerBook in November. Ouch. I bought the 15” Titanium, 3 months before the 17” Powerbook came out, in November. I got the 17” Powerbook in November 2005, 3 months before the 15” MacBook Pro came out. Ouch. Steve Jobs knows when I’m about to buy a new laptop, and hates me. Punk.
7. Leopard & iLife 07’ – Save $129 on a next-generation OS and $79 on iLife. I’m guessing Leopard availability in Summer 07’ and January 07’ for iLife. Ok, this one’s really just more buyer’s remorse :-).
Why I'm Still Holding off on the MacBook Pro 19
Posted by jason
Virtualization - What???? It's here, get on the train. What are you talking about in #6????
Blu-Ray? #1? fracking lame as a #1. Get a damn external when you need it. It's a $1000 consumer player that really isn't shipping in bulk, and the laptop drives don't yet work well (see gearlog.com). You want apple to drop that in a macbook and raise the price by nearly $1000, which is their cost to sony? Oh yeah, did we forget... format wars. Let the battle shake out, then, when a dual format drive is on the market, have apple drop it in the laptops.
Robson is great - give it some time to mature, it's not vital to drop that immature tech into all laptops immediately - plus it's an OS issue too - when is Vista shipping, Jan'07? maybe! And maybe 10.5 will incorporate flash booting. (See your other comments about maturity.)
What happened to #3
#5 - my main reason was lack of VPC support, but bootcamp and parallels turned turned that in HUGE a positive. UBs were the other reason - since I am not a PS jockey, I can live with CS2 for now, and Office is reasonably fast. What I will wait for is the Core Duo 2, and the next gen desktop.
#4 - you have argued yourself into buying now - they are on Rev E, so most of the bugs are gone, great time to buy, before they go to Core Duo 2 and start with a RevA mobo.
I renumbered the posting as well - that must have slipped past my immense editorial staff ;-).
To be honest, most my reason for holding off is probably the buyer's remorse issue - but I think I will wait for BluRay, as it's one of the technology jumps that only occur once every 5-10 years.
Oh, I will add another one. Refer to post above, and you'll see the edits.
There haven't been any reviews for the release version of parallels, although the comments are saying the thing's great. It's making me drool.
#4 You're right in that it's probably mostly stable. Core Duo 2 is a jump to 2.8 Ghz. Now THAT makes my mouth water.
If you wait 6 months for a model to mature before buying it, then naturally the next generation will come out within another 3 months, right?