As a technology professional, I typically have most of the equipment I need provided for me by my employeer. My laptop for the last four years has been a trusty ThinkPad T400. Upgraded over time to its final configuration of a 256GB SSD (FDE) and 8GB of ram. The T400 has been my trusty whip through power outages and daily VMware Workstation labs – it carried the brand name well. Lenovo support and quality is still top notch.
With that said, my family has grown to a few Macs and I’ve grown to love and envy my wife’s MacBook Pro that I got her for Christmas. During a weekend trip to Chicago for our 15th anniversary, we stopped at the Apple store to get her MBP a hard case – and I was oogling the laptops there. She had finally had enough and convinced me to order a 15″ MBP, no it wasn’t that difficult. I wish the Apple store had stocked the high resolution screens or I would have walked home with one. I was a little disappointed at the insane charges Apple tacks on for memory, but a quick search on NewEgg resolved that issue.
- i7 2.2Ghz Quad Core
- 15″ 1680-by-1050 Glossy High Resolution Screen
- 750GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive
- 16GB (2 x 8GB DDR3) Mushkin RAM
- Zagg invisibleShield skin
I scored a 2nd power brick at BestBuy for $35 (open box) and a DVI adapter.
At work I work mostly in the boot camp partition that I run Windows 7 64bit natively. However, I love using VMware Fusion to run Win 7 from bootcamp when I’m in OS X. It’s a great way to keep all my options on the table. I dare say, even if I couldn’t run OS X on this laptop – the build quality and features like the backlit screen and magsafe power connection – it more than a value for the laptop cost.