MacBook Pro, 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo, 15″ glossy screen, 4GB RAM, 320GB HD, SD card. Bought at the end of January 2010 for £1,650 (with 3 years Apple Care), on sale for £1,250.

This is why.

Well, it’s simple really. Gillian, my lovely wife, is a teensy bit excited about the possibilities of the iPad. So, one for her. Laura, our 8-year-old thinks it’s COOOL and the BBC iPlayer is her homepage. So she gets one. Then there’s our 5-year-old, Dana. She’ll be annoyed if she’s left out and trouble will ensue.

And myself… I think I might wait a while until the funds replenish a bit before I buy one. After all, I have a brand new MacBook Pro. A 2.5kg laptop which I slide into a bag and take to work every day and bring back home, along with a Magic Mouse and an iPhone dock. As opposed to a 680g iPad.

That MacBook Pro might end up on eBay.

Click for a larger view.

After using Caffeine for a couple of hours I was hooked. It’s a free utility that stops your laptop from dimming the screen or going to sleep. How is this useful? How many times have you been watching something on YouTube for the screen to dim? Cue irritated push on the trackpad to get the brightness back.

Caffeine lives in your menu bar in the shape of a cup of coffee. When you want the display not to dim, click on the empty cup which changes to a full cup and et voilà, no more display dimming. When you’re not watching the screen anymore and listening to music whilst working, click on the full cup to drain it and revert the dimming back.

Since I bought my first MacBook three years ago, I’ve migrated my applications and data across to every upgraded laptop. I suspect my MacBook Pro isn’t working as efficiently as it would after a clean system install. Would re-installing Leopard and the applications stop those random beachballs spinning? At the risk of making a rod for my own back, I’ve decided to do just that. I’ll update this post when it’s all done.

See you on the other side.

Monday, May 4th:

In between birthday parties, visitors, cooking, tidying up, the gym and various other distractions, I managed to resist the surprisingly strong impluse just to restore everything from the Time Machine backup and forget about doing a spring clean. I managed to keep the momentum going though and so far, the system feels snappier. Powering up or rebooting takes a lot less time and applications like Photoshop now launch in one bounce.

I’ll do a final update when everything’s back. Stay tuned.

Monday, May 4th, 9pm:

All done! All apps installed, as you can see from the dock above. I’ll run the Mac through it’s paces this week and see how Photoshop and Illustrator (the main beachball culprits) perform. So far the experiment went smoothly and the system feels faster, as mentioned before. I wouldn’t rush to do this again and I doubt installing Snow Leopard will force me to. Would it?

Except I forgot to de-authorise iTunes on both old computers!

I’m typing this on a brand new MacBook Pro. I called it Sandman. I picked a character from Neil Gaiman‘s books, one of my favorite authors, and with the glass screen and trackpad I chose Sandman. Tenuous at best I know, but hey, it’s my laptop.

So how did I get this beautiful, sculpted, top-spec laptop? Especially one I lusted after?

It’s a replacement for my previous MBP which exhibitied graphics glitches whenever the system’s temperature spiked (doing heavy rendering, video conversions, etc). I managed to screen record the problems and showed it to the Apple Geniuses at the Regent Street store. After a couple of days’ testing they couldn’t replicate the fault and so the manager authorised a replacement for me.

The MBP they gave me today is top spec: 15″ screen; 2.53GHz CPU; 4GB RAM; 320GB HD; and with two graphics cards, a 512MB ATI 9600GT graphics and a 256MB 9400M.

I’m speechless. And I’m very very happy!

Sometimes I read the hype before an Apple launch (who doesn’t?) and it leaves me less than enthused. “I’ve got a MacBook Pro. The specs seem very similar. Not too sure about that two-tone look. Hmm…”

Then I get home, switch my laptop on all my arguments dissolve. “Wow! It’s much faster! And thinner! ONE block of aluminium?! No rubber edges? That two-tone look is fantastic!”

Okay, I want one now.