darryl ramm's blog

Santa wears a black turtleneck and he is giving his usual keynote at the MacWorld conference on January 15th. I decided to hold off on a Macbook Pro purchase hoping to see an upgraded model coming. I need a high end machine for multimedia work, overall desktop PC replacement, including running VMware Fusion.

My MacWorld wish list would be for a 17″ high resolution screen model, with

• Intel Penryn procesor (6MB L2 cache) at 2.6 GHz
• An internal dual layer Blu-ray superdrive (ultradrive?), I guess that would make it something like a BD-RE/BD-R/DVD-R/DVD-RW/DVD+RW/DVD/CD-R/CD-RW/CD optical disk, phew. The ability to play blue ray movies would be a bonus (but not required). Fastmac already has an aftermarket Blu-ray drive available for the MacBook Pro.
• Increased express card connectivity. Ideally two seperate ExpressCard universal slots instead of the single /34 slot in the current MacBook Pro models.  Universal slots accomodate /54 as well as /34 cards. I suspect there would actually be space to put two universal slots on a 17″ MacBook Pro. Failing that one universal and one /34 slot would do. These would give me the ability to carry around an expresscard/54 CF Card reader (for my Digital SLR camera) internally in the universal slot and an expresscard/34 SATA-II controller for hooking up lots of disk for video editing. I’d like Apple, to at least make the single /34 slot a universal slot.

C’mon Santa I’ve been a good boy can I please have these wishes

I stopped using a deskside PC about two years ago and like having my whole computing life in one place on a laptop. I’ve been thinking over what to do with my current ThinkPad T42 laptop which is just too underpowered for what I need. High on the list is buying a MacBook Pro and making the switch back to the Macintosh as a primary computer. Part of wanting to upgrade is driven by lack of disk space on the ThinkPad T42 and part of it is driven by wanting more horsepower and memory to run Photoshop on larger images and to do video editing. For video I have an old copy of Adobe Premiere 6.5 and I’ve been leery of upgrading this on my ThinkPad since most people I know who is doing video are working with Final Cut Express or Final Cut Studio on a Mac.

I’ve been looking at different options and thinking about the switch. Just some of the software I use is shown in the photo above. I thought it might be interesting look at switching from a Windows laptop to a Mac with a reasonable number of applications and so I thought I’d write about some of the experiences. Bottom line is it is going to cost me about $1,200 in software upgrades/cross grades and software relicensing to move to the Mac, and that is without a big splash on something like Final Cut Studio. I wish Apple had a program where I could get an upgrade credit for Premiere to Final Cut Studio, that would make the whole decision pretty automatic. Which will make the purchase of a high-end MacBook Pro something like a $4,700 purchase – Yikes. Sure I get a platform that can do a lot more, especially with video editing, but it’s interesting just how much it costs to move. Time costs of lost productivity and relearning things is going be significantly higher than a few thousand dollars but I look at this as having to bite the bullet some day.

Obviously any switch made easier with the availability of VMware Fusion and SWSoft Parallels Desktop. Don’t expect me to be impartial here, I’ll be using Fusion and I think it is a lot more stable than Parallels Desktop. But both Fusion and Parallels will perform much better than the old Connectix (now Microsoft) VirtualPC did on PowerPC based Macintosh systems.

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