Is it here yet?

Well, I'm finally on my way to joining the Mac owning community. Apple announced their latest revisions to the Macbook Pro series on Tuesday and my order was in minutes later. I've been hankering for a new laptop for some time, since I'm currently dependant on my work laptop which is far from ideal (even aside from the fact that it's current stuck running at 600MHz and refuses to recognise any cd's/dvd's). I considered buying one earlier in the year, but the general rule of thumb with Mac products seems to be "wait for the second revision" and given that there were a few reports of problems initially, waiting seemed the wisest course. Even if it did nearly kill me. Patience is for people who don't mind waiting!

I was also hoping that waiting would see a bump in specs, primarily in memory capacity, hard disk space, and screen resolution. I was rewarded on two out of three fronts. Maximum memory is now 3Gb. I was hoping for 4, but three is a definite step in the right direction. I consider it important since I've never owned a laptop I didn't wish I could stuff more memory into towards the end of it's life. Similarly with hard disk space. I'm disappointed that Apple didn't up the screen resolution however. It's still 1680x1050 on the 17" model I ordered. I can live with it, but I was hoping for 1920x1200, the same as my work laptop. In lieu of anything higher I've always found 1920x1200 to be an acceptable resolution to work with. More pixels would be better, but then given that most people seen unable to read the text on my screen as is, I doubt there'd be much of a market. Still with the next version of Mac OS X sporting support for resolution Independence I was hoping we might have seen some improvement on this front.

The biggest downside now is having to wait. And wait. Irritatingly, although Apple's website claimed that I could expect delivery in 7-10 days when I first placed the order, this jumped up to 15 as soon as I was finished. I've been compulsively checking my order status since then, and it's not changing! 3 weeks has never seemed so long.

I do wish Apple would pull their finger out and get around to opening an Apple Store in Edinburgh already!