Oculus Habent's Journal: Changing of the Guard IV: MacBook Pro

NOTE: This is me, waxing poetic about my old laptop. Skip to the **** if you don't care. :P

I'm a laptop kind of guy. When they said you can't take it with you, they there wrong. I've owned a PowerBook since 1995, starting with the PowerBook 190. After a summer of interning, I bought myself a PowerBook 1400cs in 1997, and traded my 190 in on a PowerBook G3 (Pismo) through a deal Apple set up to appease owners of 190s and 5300s -- bad power connector design led to them snapping of motherboards... happened to me twice.

My G3 has served me well, though I've been unkind to it. Over the years, I've literally stepped on it twice, with no ill effects. I've lost the IR port cover. I fell and shattered the screen, which I later replaced. The 10-gig drive was too small, so I upped it to a 30-gig, and the DVD-ROM died, so I replaced it with a Combo drive from an iBook -- without a faceplate. The new battery's contacts have become bent and it spontaneously loses power, so it's become a tethered portable, too. I've been hard with the connectors, and one USB and one FireWire port don't work anymore. The case is cracked around the TouchPad button (happened the same time as shattering the screen).

Still, it's been with me for over six years, and seen every version of Mac OS between 9.0.2 and 10.3.9, including Mac OS X Beta. I've logged thousands of hours on this keyboard. It's alternated between my primary and secondary computer as my PCs grew and aged. It's no longer fast enough to play some things -- even Homestar Runner gets out of sync at times -- but it's got a solid browser and e-mail client, and I am not ashamed to say that I am fond of it.

I have long considered the Pismo to be some kind of peak in Apple laptop design. Not that the TiBook, AlBook, and MacBook Pro aren't great systems; it's just that the Pismo had so many things going for it. Removable media drive that offers a second battery. Modem, Ethernet, IrDA, 802.11, and FireWire for networking, and I've used them all. I've used every port, slot and connector on my PowerBook for some real task. It's substantially upgradeable -- the wireless, memory, hard drive and processor are all accessed under the keyboard and require at most a philips screwdriver. I could push it to a 550 MHz G4 with 1 gig of RAM if I chose, but the upgrades are half the cost of a new MacBook Pro.

****
I had my eye on the late-model PowerBook G4s, and the MacBook Pro, and waiting has only brought better things. $2500 has gone from 512MB to 2GB of memory, 60GB to 120GB, 128 to 256 VRAM, 802.11g to 802.11n. So, I've been fighting with myself for months, and what I might call good sense finally gave in to the shiny.

Refurbished, with a 20% discount, I should be seeing my new MacBook Pro 2.33 Core 2 Duo today or Monday, depending on the whims of FedEx.