About 4 years ago this month I bought a Rev A 15" Macbook Pro. 2.8Ghz C2D, which I think was the best available CPU at the time, and 4GB RAM, which I think was a step down from a maxed 8GB.
I wondered at the time if I was fooling myself by a) buying the first of the new Unibody line, when 'first revisions' are notoriously more accident prone than their later evolutions, and b) by spending a few hundred £'s extra on a CPU upgrade, given that I'd never seen a computer get past 3 years and still being able to handle new games and software.
Mountain Lion is running perfectly right now, without any juddering or loss of animations. I recently started using Final Cut Pro X, my first time video editing, and it's running pretty much like a dream while crunching through 1080p footage. I haven't installed many new games, and I don't think it would go especially well if I did. But I could handle Portal 2 fine at medium-high ( (not highest) levels of detail and max resolution last year.
I've accepted that even though it's been enough time that I feel like most would say justifies an upgrade, I don't need to. It would save time for video editing, which I'm admittedly starting to do at a semi-professional level, and it would run games better, but those tasks are not unbearably slow right now. They're better than a brand new 13"MBP my Dept bought for video editing purposes can handle them. For me, thinking that this is 4 years (which we all know is a hell of a time in technology terms) I'm a little stunned and pleasantly surprised.
I think I paid around £2k, I think a little over, in the first place (education discount at the time). I've had this thing for about 1500 days. That's £1.33 per day. I can't say if that number would be different if I'd changed this or that about the configuration, but I went as big as I could, and it's doing great.
So if you're umming and ahhing over bumping up some aspects of a near-future purchase, I'd say that there are benefits to going for it. I didn't believe a computer could still be comfortably used 4 years later, now I do. Basically, it's justifiable to think of that extra $300 as an investment that will give you some tangible benefit.
I wondered at the time if I was fooling myself by a) buying the first of the new Unibody line, when 'first revisions' are notoriously more accident prone than their later evolutions, and b) by spending a few hundred £'s extra on a CPU upgrade, given that I'd never seen a computer get past 3 years and still being able to handle new games and software.
Mountain Lion is running perfectly right now, without any juddering or loss of animations. I recently started using Final Cut Pro X, my first time video editing, and it's running pretty much like a dream while crunching through 1080p footage. I haven't installed many new games, and I don't think it would go especially well if I did. But I could handle Portal 2 fine at medium-high ( (not highest) levels of detail and max resolution last year.
I've accepted that even though it's been enough time that I feel like most would say justifies an upgrade, I don't need to. It would save time for video editing, which I'm admittedly starting to do at a semi-professional level, and it would run games better, but those tasks are not unbearably slow right now. They're better than a brand new 13"MBP my Dept bought for video editing purposes can handle them. For me, thinking that this is 4 years (which we all know is a hell of a time in technology terms) I'm a little stunned and pleasantly surprised.
I think I paid around £2k, I think a little over, in the first place (education discount at the time). I've had this thing for about 1500 days. That's £1.33 per day. I can't say if that number would be different if I'd changed this or that about the configuration, but I went as big as I could, and it's doing great.
So if you're umming and ahhing over bumping up some aspects of a near-future purchase, I'd say that there are benefits to going for it. I didn't believe a computer could still be comfortably used 4 years later, now I do. Basically, it's justifiable to think of that extra $300 as an investment that will give you some tangible benefit.
