When I’m going to Japan I will have to live with a laptop as my only computer. Right now I use my iMac for anything serious and my laptop is just for bringing to school and friends when I want to have something to surf or code a little on. The problem is that I know my MacBook Air isn’t going to be “enough” for me if it’s going to be my only computer. I’m going to be doing a lot of photo editing, probably some video editing and just generally be using it all the time, so I want something more powerful.

New MacBook Pros

I came to the decision that I was going to buy a MacBook Pro to have in Japan instead of my Air a couple of months ago, since then I’ve been waiting for Apple to release the new MacBook Pro’s. They did so just a couple of days ago and there are some good news and some bad news. The good news is that they lowered the prices on the entire lineup and threw in some pretty nice stuff on the new 15″ models. The bad news is that the biggest update on the 13″ models were the battery, they got a new graphics card but they still have the old CPU’s. It sort of stings because I think the 15″ laptop is huuuge, but I don’t want to be stuck with an old CPU.

I’ve been very much back and forth on this entire 13″ vs 15″ issue, but right now I feel that I actually do want the better performance of the 15″, and hopefully I can learn to live with the size of a 15″ laptop.

The thing that has sort of sealed the deal is that I’ve compared the Swedish and the Japanese Apple stores for prices, and it breaks down as follows:

So as you can see the difference is quite a lot. I have a big problem with the fact that I want to buy it now. When I’ve decided I want to buy something I usually want to buy it right away, because there’s no reason to wait…

But as you can see, there’s a lot of reason to wait. I’m obviously not going to buy a 15″ in Sweden considering the price of it in Japan. But if I were to buy a 13″ in Sweden, I could add just 859 SEK to get the much, much better 15″ in Japan—that’s nothing!

In the end, there is simply no justifiable reason to buy it in Sweden, not even the better resale value of having a Swedish (and not International) keyboard when I’m going to sell it again; so I’m going to have to wait either way. And in Japan, I really cant find any reason for buying the 13″ when the 15″ is so much cheaper there.

So, bottom line. Even though I don’t like the size of the 15″ the performance is noticeably better, and the added screen size and much higher resolution might actually come in handy when using Photoshop and such. The 13″ has much better battery life and is actually portable, but I just can’t stand paying premium price for old hardware; no matter how “hardware agnostic” I usually am.

There will be some minor difficulties with having to sell this computer before I leave and then have to be in Japan without a computer until I’m able to buy the new computer there. But in the end, it’s going to be worth it to have the top-of-the-line stuff. I think.

I thought this video was so awesome I just had to share it. I have been very reserved in my judgement of the iPad. I’ve never said I didn’t want one and I’ve never said it will be “useless” or anything of the kind. The following video is an example of how easy it is to use, yet how really powerful it is at entertaining and teaching.

I think the iPad will show it’s true colors after about 3-6 months when most of the life-changing apps will have been released for it.

Just wanted to put a link here to what I think is an excellent explanation of the iPad and why it exists.

http://www.edibleapple.com/ipad-a-computer-for-the-rest-of-them/

Let me set the scene for you. The year is 2015 and most of the web have been upgraded to the HTML 5 standard. Video is delivered with HTML 5 and games are all produced with WebGL or some derivative thereof. You don’t really care about the games though. You’re a wealthy 30-something businessman with a successful startup behind you. Your new company is thriving and pushing forward and everyone is looking to you for inspiration and approval. In your small world, you are the big man.

This is the iPad. The only kind of Panel I would ever bring to the beach.

All your life you’ve never really been able to adapt to the “normal workplace”. 9 to 5 doesn’t suit you and because of your position now you can choose any time and place to work at as you wish. Today, you’ve chosen the beach in Maui, next to your summer house.

You do almost all of your business by phone, with a wireless headset you sit in a beach chair next to a short table. On the table is a drink, it’s orange-red and you think it’s a Jamaica but you don’t really know; you just ordered something sweet from the waiter who works at the bar next to your house. Next to your drink is a panel, a screen with sexy sleek application showing you a merged stream of important people on Twitter and the hottest news-sites on the web.

You get a call, it’s Phil – the economics-guy -  you know he has a pretty big presentation tomorrow and he’s calling you to get a confidence boost and make sure his slides and data seems OK. “The presentation should be in your Inbox” says Phil. You reach over and grab the panel next to your drink, putting it in your lap. You exit your news-feed and check the Inbox, it is indeed there. You open the presentation up, check over the layout and wording, you fix a couple of things and make sure the data and graphs look alright, you add a different less cheesy transition to a slide (Phil has a perverted fancy for using the star-wipe) and then send it back to him. “Just checked it over Phil and it’s alright, some minor fixes, I sent it back to you”. You talk it over with Phil and make sure he’s on the ball with everything and then hang up.

While the panel is in your lap you think you might as well check the latest numbers on your stocks and go through some more email. You log onto Facebook and update your status to “Chillin’ on the beach as usual, think I’ll go for some scuba-diving today though”.

You put on the latest episode of The Daily Show and stand it back on the table next to your drink.

Life is sweet.

I’ve been keeping quite busy the last couple of days. School takes up a lot but the little extra time I have I spend trying to make a little file upload demo in Cappuccino, which is really awesome. I love being able to code Objective-C and then just refresh my browser to see my application running in there instead of on the desktop.

Another very awesome thing is that I have now been officially approved as an iPhone Developer, meaning I can develop apps on my own phone and if they get good enough I can start selling them in the App Store. The entire application process took only 6 work-days which I have to say is very impressive! I’ve heard of people having to wait months for their licenses so that was pretty awesome. The first app up for development is essentially a phone version of DHG, which I hope can get quite awesome.

There is in fact so much awesome, that I can’t stop thinking about all of this awesome, resulting in me not getting any sleep. The upside of this is that it will result in tomorrow being very much less awesome and hopefully I’ll be able to get some sleep then.

I can’t wait till Christmas break when I’ll actually have some free time!