New Laptop

[Mike Farley]

For most purposes, CPU power reached suffiency a long time back and many of Intel's advances are more about improving other features such as power consumption or support for the new higher resolution monitors. Sure, more cores are better provided applications can take advantage and I will probably end up with a higher resolution monitor at some point, but getting to that point could be a couple of years or more away. I do not envisage that my laptop will take over from my desktop and I am proposing to buy a MacBook in spite of it being from Apple, not that I see any great benefit in OS X. Maybe that will change, for example depending on what happens with Windows 10, but for now my requirements are being met by what is currently available.

[davidc]

I hope you didn't buy a new laptop yet, your solution just arrived

http://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/

Lightweight, good screen, stylus for photo editing in mobile lightroom and also hipster enough to match your mirrorless cameras

[Mike Farley]

I hope you didn't buy a new laptop yet, your solution just arrived

http://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/

Lightweight, good screen, stylus for photo editing in mobile lightroom and also hipster enough to match your mirrorless cameras

As it happens, I have just had a very expensive trip to PC World which included a Mac Book Pro 13" 256 GB among the multiple purchases, although I have not yet had enough spare time to unpack it.

While I can see the attraction of the iPad Pro, it does not do all the things of which a laptop is capable such as drive a digital projector or run Photoshop, both of which are requirements for me. As for being hipster .......

[Mike Farley]

Well, that was eventful. I bought the MacBook Pro on Wednesday, but today was my first opportunity to check it out. The operating system keeps a tally of the charge cycles and the battery status. Curiously, for a supposedly new machine, the cycle count was 2 and the battery would not charge as it needed to be replaced. Very disappointing for such an expensive laptop, but at least PC World made no fuss about the refund. I was an Apple owner for the grand total of two days, most of which the machine spent sealed in its box. So for the moment it is back to considering my options.

One other thing I would say, the unboxing was not particularly exciting, but at least I might get to do it twice.

[davidc]

I think that was spectacularly unlucky, and I do feel sorry for you. But it did make me smile, sorry

[Mike Farley]

I think that was spectacularly unlucky ......

The guy at PC World had been trained on Apples and reckoned that he had never encountered anything like that previously. I will be checking out that odd cycle count before I make another purchase, though.

I was setting up two machines yesterday as I had also purchased the club's new laptop at the same time. The score ended up Lenovo 1, Apple 0.

But it did make me smile, sorry

Well it is kinda funny, spending all that time to make a decision and then the damn thing doesn't work.

[Mike Farley]

For the second time in my life, the second time this month in fact, I have become a Mac Book Pro owner. So far, this copy seems to be behaving itself and has not done anything at all untoward such as explode. It is even running off the battery, which is a first for me.

So this time I do not have to beat up up anyone at PC World for selling me another duff machine, a relief for all no doubt. It is currently in the process of installing Photoshop, to be followed by Lightroom, so then we will see how it goes.

[Mike Farley]

So far, so good with the new laptop. I am not sure how Apple ha achieved it, but the Mac Book has a pleasing tactile feel which is quite unlike anything I have used previously. The battery life is astonishing and I would feel confident in using it all day without venturing anywhere near a power socket. So far I have only loaded a few Raw files, but it is quick enough for image editing. That includes Lightroom's new HDR and panorama functions which make significant demands on performance.

I am still getting used to OS X, but its implementation on a laptop is well suited to the platform and it is easy to operate the machine using just the trackpad, although I still find a mouse more intuitive for editing images. For now, I'll stick with a conventional mouse as I do not find that Apple's own, clever though it is, adds anything. Rather the reverse; it's an odd shape and the surface is sensitive to finger movements so that it becomes a trackpad, making it all too easy to move the cursor or scroll indavertently.