This has been quite a weird couple of years. It was a while ago that I chronicled all of the Macs I’ve owned in my life. I’ve owned over 20 at this point. I used to be a laptop only guy because I didn’t see a point in owning a desktop. Then again, I was living a very mobile lifestyle, laptops were fast enough and I was making a lot less money back then. Laptops were around $2000 and I’d keep them for a while and sell for an upgrade. At some point, I came into a bit of extra money. I used that extra money to buy a MacBook Air (back before they were cool) and I also had a 17″ MacBook Pro at the time. I quickly realized the MBP 17 was just a desktop computer so I sold it and got an iMac.
It was the best decision I had ever made. I was one of the first people rocking the iMac+MacBook Air setup that I knew of. It wasn’t a cheap setup to have but it was fantastic. The 27″ iMac + 30″ LCD display with a 13″ MacBook Air and I was a happy camper.
Then I moved to New Hampshire.
It was a pricey move and I sold both my iMac and MacBook Air. Work gave me a Dell notebook and from August to January, I was PC only. It was pretty rough. I saved my pennies and bought an iMac and MacBook air this January. The iMac I bought was the quad-core Intel i5 and a stock configuration of 1 terabyte hard drive with 4 gigabytes of ram. I added 8 gigabytes for a total of 12. It was a nice setup but it was technically a down-grade from my previous iMac Core i7. No worries as I did a lot of traveling and the iMac had turned into a glorified home server. In fact, I had Snow Leopard server on it and now have Lion server running. It’s a great tool. I manage my own home wiki, user groups, chat server and time machine backups just like a time capsule from my MacBook Air over Wi-Fi.
Wait. Why am I selling my computers again?
Well, from January to July, a lot has happened at Apple. The Magic Trackpad has become awesome and the iMacs got a HUGE speed boost with the addition of Thunderbolt and the MacBook Air 11″ can now sport a Core i7 processor, improved graphics and larger SSD. Ah and Thunderbolt is on the MacBook Air as well.It’s a fantastic upgrade in just 6 months. I really thought my MBA was safe for now and had planned on waiting for a huge iMac redesign to do any changes but, I think now is the time to buy because I’m at risk for some major loss in value if I wait for the next revisions of these products.
So, what will I be buying when my Macs sell? Well, for starters, I’m picking up the maxed out 11 Inch MacBook Air. The 13″ is only $150 more with the same features but I really love the 11 inch form factor. The only reason I’d go 13 is to get the extra 2 hours of battery life that come with the larger body. The maxed out 11 Inch is $1500 +/-. Worth it for a Core i7 machine that fits in the airline tray table slot with 6 hours of battery life. The iMac upgrade is still up in the air. I desperately would LOVE to have the high end Core i7 CPU with the 2 gigabytes of video ram and the 2 terabyte HDD + 256 GB SSD option. That machine would cost just over $3,100. It’s a lot of money. If I forgo the SSD, CPU upgrade and GPU upgrade, I can have it for $2000 and have that extra $1000 left over to buy a Thunderbolt Display to go beside it. Ooh La La! However, owning an SSD equipped MacBook, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, I loathe the absolutely shitty responsiveness of my iMac when it comes to getting things loaded up and going. Is that worth $750 more? Doubtful. Depending on what my iMac sells for, I’ll then decide what iMac I’ll be getting to replace it.
The good news is, both my iMac and MacBook Air are now on eBay. The iMac surpassed a $1000 bid after hour 4 and the MacBook Air hit $600 after 3 hours. I’m sure, over the next 9 days, that things will work out just fine for me.