Ok, I had hoped to go into more detail on my choice of laptop, but hey – life got in the way. I have been busy enjoying a nice little holiday from work and decided that I would focus on resting up before starting my new job in London Village .
I originally decided it was time to try a 17” MacBookPro and as Apple are kind enough to offer a 14day money back returns policy I walked into my local Apple shop and picked one up for the horrendous price of £1,889 incVAT. It is expensive, but Apple charge a premium for their brand so I decided to test it for 14days and see if it was really worth it.
I didn’t really spend much time in OSX, I tried to install a few basic apps for work and as soon as I found they didn’t have OSX variants I lost interest. I needed to do some “actual work” so installed Win7 via boot camp immediately. Once I got Win7 installed, I was pleased to see windows update found almost all the drivers, but for argument sakes installed the driver package from the Apple CD. Even with their own tools installed I immediately had issues with the keyboard.
The first thing I did was join my domain and reboot…. upon reboot I went to press Ctrl-Alt…. erm…. there is no Del key?! Fantastic. How do they expect me to log on then? After sourcing an external keyboard for the Del key, logging on and checking the web for a solution it became obvious I wasn’t the first with this issue. I ended up using an old Windows Server 2003 resource kit tool to remap the keys in the registry. It worked but still wasn’t ideal and if I didn’t have an external keyboard handy I would have been well and truly knackered.
There were a couple of other issues as well, the laptop gets hot and I’m not just talking about warm. I’ve had my share of hardcore gaming laptops in the past and this thing was right up there in the “I used to have skin” category. Some of the reviews mentioned it gets warm – they were being very generous. Especially on the left palm rest.
Despite this, I did really like it. It is thin, light and the battery life is amazing. Despite being based on the old dual core Core2 technology it was quick and the graphics were acceptable. Credit where credit due Apple have really done well on the drivers and the system just works. That said, with the new model just around the corner I just couldn’t justify the massively inflated price for under powered last generation hardware – so I took it back after the 14days was up.
Back to Dell for me….