Macbook Pro Retina 13″ [Review time]

Lounging at Caffe Nero

I’ve never really owned a laptop. Sure all my computers at work were laptops and I’ve dabbled in both a netbook and a cheap Dell laptop, but I never considered any of them as my primary workstation. Finally I’ve purchased myself a Macbook Pro retina and now it flows in how much I was missing.

First thing is first, lets get the specs out; I got myself a 13 inch Macbook Retina with 2.6ghz Haswell processor, 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD. With Lightroom I really wanted to make sure this thing ran buttery smooth.

I already own an iPhone, iPad and Mac Pro. Justification for a Macbook Pro was difficult knowing I always had my iPad out and the Mac Pro was forever going to be a beefier Mac to use than the Macbook Pro. So what were my use cases:

  1. For starters, I never seem to find the time when I’m home to blog. Right now I’m finding time to actually write stuff when I’m on a train (about twice a week). Which means you’ll get to see more articles (not that anyone reads)
  2. I’ve got about 30,000 photos in my Lightroom catalogue. Most of which are not fully processed or meta tagged. Recently I’ve got into the habit of adding tags, collections and geo tags on my photos. It makes browsing pleasant. I can click on the “Me” collection and pow, all photos with me are shown (yup, there are a lot!). Anyway, lightroom isn’t something I can easily do on an iPad and the motivation at home is next to none. It’s a mammoth task I’ve seem to find energy in doing once I have a macbook pro. At some point I might even lug it for festivals or whatever to do some real portable photo processing. I do this already
  3. Doing computery stuff at the ladyfriend’s place. Sometimes it sucks not having a mac there.

These were both my reasons for getting it and so far I’ve been fulfilling the destiny.

So here’s an unordered list of what I find good about the Macbook Pro:

  • The design of the laptop, every now and then I would caress the thing, man that aluminium feels smooth.
  • Retina display is amaze balls, it helps greatly in Lightroom when I’m judging photos (like meat). I haven’t struggled with real estate yet so I haven’t found the need to increase space.
  • The damn thing is fast. Startup times and sleep / unsleep times are just about on par with an iPad, that’s the dream for a laptop
  • Battery life, I have 3 adaptors; work, home, ladyfriend. I don’t see the need for carrying the adaptors in my bag (heavy). There’s so much juice in this thing
  • SD card reader: very useful for rocking my X-M1 and X100s. Still need to setup wireless on the X-M1 though
  • Being completely wireless: so besides no having to rock a charger most of the time, the macbook pro also plays nice in letting my stream music from the device to my airport express. It’s nice seeing things work and nice being able to choose your music from your laptop instead of using a remote app or whatever. Also brownie points for iTunes match working.
  • Portability, I can carry all of this in my 13 inch Knomo leather bag. There’s a small bit of weight but ultimately doable for day to day lugging.

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