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“I required a decent laptop for my work and after...”

Written on: 03/04/2011 by wilsonjo (5 reviews written)

I required a decent laptop for my work and after looking around and doing quite a lot of research, I decided that, contrary to popular opinion, the price of the Apple offering wasn't so different from a similar specification of PC style laptop and as I already owned an Apple iMac, I bought one of the original unibody 15" MacBook Pro's.



I wish I'd bought the full compliment of RAM at the beginning as I run Windows XP as a virtual machine (because of one particular VPN application which only seems to work under XP) and with 2Gb of RAM it slows down when running this scenario.



I all other respects, it's a great machine and has proven to be quite rugged - I have worn out two neoprene cases because of rubbing against the inside of my motorcycle panniers, it's been dropped more than once off a tabletop on to tiled floors and has suffered several other forms of abuse, it's still looking good (OK, there is a small dent in one corner after one of the drops, but that type of fall would have destroyed a "plastic cased PC laptop).



Battery life is OK - I often have several USB peripherals plugged in and it drains in about three hours, but as one of the items is a USB powered disk drive (used for the excellent Time Machine backup), I don't think that's bad at all.



The screen is excellent, as is the feature of the keyboard backlight which I find invaluable when working outdoors. The trackpad took a bit of getting used to, but I miss it when I have to use a PC laptop now.



If you think Apple products are expensive, then you really aren't comparing like-for-like.