Thoughts on a new MacBook Pro?

[steuard]

Anyone know a good reason why I shouldn't get (via startup funds at work) one of the new MacBook Pro 15" i7 models? More importantly, does anyone have advice on

1) glossy vs. matte screen?

2) standard hard drive vs. solid state drive?

I'm leaning toward the cheaper glossy screen and the much cheaper standard hard drive at this point. (I've heard oddly negative things about Apple's solid state drive technology, in fact.)

(A more extreme possibility would be to get a 13" model instead, for the greater portability and slightly better battery life. But I think I want something with pretty high end processing power so I can use it for research when I'm away from work. We've got our cute netbook if we really want portability.)

[Edit: Fixed typo in first sentence: shouldN'T!]

Comments

[beth_leonard]

I used the migration assistant for my new mac too. The first time, that is. It totally failed to move my iCal data over correctly, which was one of the main reasons we got another mac (so Jon and I could be on the same calendaring system). It failed in weird and non-obvious ways, too. Many of my events were correct, but some of my weekly recurring events just went *poof* with no explanation of where they'd gone, others in the same calendar appeared just fine.

In short, I didn't trust the results, so I copied files I wanted over by hand and reinstalled all software I cared about manually. I waited until after I owned an iPod touch and then used that to transfer my calendar and contacts data between machines. I'm sure that also got rid of some cruft I didn't need too.

YMMV.
--Beth

[kirin]

Huh, that sounds pretty weird (and extremely annoying), but I don't use iCal, so I can't provide a data point on that front. For me, it set up everything correctly with iTunes, Mail, Safari,and contact data, which saved me quite a bit of time. The only thing I really had to do was weed out and/or upgrade apps that were pre-Intel binaries.

[beth_leonard]

I'm guessing there's something non-standard in my Calendar file somewhere. There were problems exporting and importing some, but not all of the iCal calendars when I tried to do it manually. The iPod method of transfer seemed to work however. (At least, I don't think I've forgotten to go to any events that went poof that I didn't notice... one never really knows...)

--Beth