January 11, 2006
the agony & the ecstasy
So we finally have an Intel-based laptop from Apple… what we’ve wished and waited for — but how cruel the debut. Jonah was telling me last night how bummed Jason was about the news, having just bought a new PowerBook three weeks ago. I’m pretty torn myself… still using my old 1GHz PowerBook that’s at least 2 years old, and now that I’m on the road all the time I really need a new one that can run Final Cut, Adobe Creative Suite, Flash Pro, maybe a little World of Warcraft, and encode an iPod movie in less than 10 hours. Despite everyone telling me just to buy a new Powerbook already, that Intels weren’t coming out til June/Jan 2007/etc, I waited til MacWorld just in case… and sure enough, they’re coming. Now I am really in a bind. I need a new PB now, and the MacBooks won’t be in hand, you gotta figure, til at least March. Sure, I could pick up a refurbished PowerBook at a discount, or look for people unloading them on eBay, but for just a few hundred dollars more you could put down the money for a shiny new MacBook, that’s benchmarked at up to four times the speed. What to do?
I guess there are worse problems to have.
Jason, some consolation (or how I might also justify getting a Powerbook like yours):
- the new MacBooks have a lower resolution than your top-of-the-line PowerBook - still the pinnacle of 15” PowerPC laptop engineering.
- yours has FireWire 800 support, so some video guy will want to buy it.
- the brighter screen would probably keep you up at night anyway.
- security! Who knows what bugs the Intel Macs will have in the first six months. We can’t afford to have kottke.org offline.
update: according to my sister, who just sent a comment on this post — I am a NERD.