For those of you who questioned the reason to get 8GB of memory in my new computer I give you: “Using all the memory”

Memory usage

This little feat was accomplished by simultaneously running Safari with YouTube, rendering HD video in iMovie and processing images with Lightroom, under no time did the computer seem slow or stall or anything like that. So yes, it is worth getting 8GB of memory in a computer.

I’m hanging out with Emma and thought it would be nice to do a little comparison between using a SATA disk and a regular disk. We have identical computers except that one thing, so it’s quite interesting. It’s worth saying though that we did this test twice and the first time hers was very much more slower at starting up, but the second time we did the test, my computer was faster than the first time at starting Photoshop. But it does give a hint at what kind of improvements you get with an SSD.

It would be fun comparing this computer to my iMac, but the test would run pretty long because it takes like 5 minutes to boot my iMac

I have to say again; I am very, very pleased with my new computer. It is sooooo much faster than my iMac. It’s.. incomparable. So, In honor of my new computer I will post a print-screen of my desktop.

I saw this wallpaper somewhere before but couldn’t find it again, so I found the text and I found the image of the fridge separately and put it together. I find it quite funny.

Screenshot

I’ve gotten my new computer and I’ve put the SSD drive in it! It’s blazing fast but right now I don’t know if it’s the drive or the fact that I now have 6gb free memory where I previously had 14mb free.

It’s very very nice. The computer is big as fuck, but I think I’ll get used to it. It’s pretty sweet to have a more “real” screen on a laptop. Now I’m gonna try installing Photoshop and such and see how that works.

Update: It takes 20.5 seconds to start up Photoshop CS5 on my desktop computer (iMac) and it takes 2.9 seconds on my laptop!

I got back from Stockholm a couple of days ago. I was up there to spend some time with a couple of friends before I went to Japan. A nice couple of days!

Me and Emanuel playing Race for the Galaxy in Stockholm.

Yesterday I got my visa, finally. So now everything is 100% ready to for the trip!

I have also decided to buy the Macbook in Sweden. It turns out there are a number of advantages for me to buy it in Sweden. It has been sent from China now so I’m hoping it’ll arrive some time next week! I might make a video of the unboxing and replacing of HDD.

That’s a simple update of what’s happening right now. Not really that much, which is nice. I wish I had someone to play Race for the Galaxy with though. It’s a strategy card-game which you can see in the picture above. It’s very fun yet causal to play.

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.