therealmac.net

First a little bit of background. I’ve been using Apple laptops for the past 9 years. Overall they have served my needs remarkably well, with the exception of the 1st iBook/500 I had which was ungodly slow. My current system is a 17 inch MacBook Pro with a 2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, a 500 GB 5400 RPM hard drive and an upgrade to 8 GB of memory (which I installed almost a year ago and March).

When I got the system, I was thinking that I could have a computer serve all my entertainment needs and didn’t actually have television or DVR in my room. Flash forward a few years, now I have and find the experience much more pleasurable than watching video on a computer screen.

I also discovered that having a 17 inch laptop is not all it’s cracked up to be, especially if you actually use it in your lap or plan to carry it around with you. Mine is bulky, somewhat heavy at 6.6 pounds and tends to get rather warm when I have the Nvidia GeForce 9600 graphics chip enabled, something I tend to do for higher performance.

Though the 800 pound gorilla in the room is performance, my hard drive it is definitely on the slow side, taking 30 bounces of GarageBand before I can open the program.  Even with the extra RAM, I really notice a difference in programs that are constantly writing to the disk.

Results above are mine, drive is running at 1.5Gigabit, below are from a MacBook Air.  A disk on a 6Gb SATA that reads 5x faster, affecting so many different aspects of my computing experience.  Very compelling.

I would like to upgrade to solid-state technology, but am not entirely sure how much I’m sold for the capacity I want. I’m looking at a 256 GB unit from Crucial that runs about $339 USD.  I’m also at a point in my life where I want to do the financially responsible thing and spending that much for a computer upgrade seems a little bit on the excessive side. Specifically with the CPU already being generation old and the graphics card about 2 generations old and incapable of being upgraded. On the reverse side, I could use his hard drive and another system and sell it with the original when the time comes.

Crucial M4 CT256M4SSD2 2.5″ 256GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

Two other factors that process on my mind are Intel’s microprocessor roadmap and soon to come updates to the MacBook model line. There’s nothing worse than having buyer’s remorse right after buying a tech gadget because something else has eclipsed it. Of course there’ll always be something bigger faster or otherwise more enticing, it’s the nature of the beast.

Newer laptops will have 4K video acceleration built into the chipset (It sounds good in theory, but am not sure in  practice with US high speed bandwidth already straining with current 1080P video), higher resolution ‘Retina’ displays, and as far as Macs go possibly a departure from the current unibody design.  Some of the changes are over a year away and others even if they are available will command a high price premium. Either of which would not affect my decision very heavily. Shit happens, get a grip.

Does it make financial sense to switch from my current system to one of the smaller screen but higher overall perceived performance?

When I purchased the 17 inch MacBook Pro in summer of 2009, I paid approximately $2200 for it, not including the memory upgrade, a Speck case, an inexpensive SATA enclosure and PCI express card. Today February 2012 on eBay a system with similar specs will sell for approximately $1300, excluding shipping charges and eBay / PayPal fees. Between educational/corporate discounts and shopping  I can get a MacBook Air 13 Core i5, 4gb, 256gb flash and Intel HD Graphics for 1498 with a $50 restaurant.com gift card and 2.5% cashback from FatWallet.  I’m also pretty sure there would be no state sales tax for me.

Thoughts welcome.  I’ve had way too many laptops over the years.  This one will probably last me a year or two before I sell it and get something else.  Also Macs hold their value pretty well.  Probably more so on the low end than the high end percentage-wise.  $150-200 for a new machine isn’t that much.

I did own a MacBook Air about 4 years ago, but sold it because its performance did not live up to my expectations. It had an 80 GB 4200 RPM hard drive, 2 GB of RAM 1.6 GHz core 2 Duo processor and a really paltry GMA X3100 graphics card. The fans would rev up into high gear whenever I would look at a video on YouTube.  Other than that the machine was super quiet and felt like I wasn’t even using a computer.

Carrying 6.6lb around vs 2.96 is a pretty big difference.  It may not sound like it, but when balancing the machine on your palm, or on your back there is a perceivable difference immediately.  I’m still not sure what I want to do yet.  Waiting and seeing does have its merits sometimes. A hardware refresh would also make it a much easier decision.  I could also keep the drive I have now, pull out my SuperDrive and throw the SSD in my laptop and have two drives.  Decisions…

There is always the possibility I’ll never be satisfied with my choice.  So maybe it’s easier to accept there will always be something I don’t like and just hold onto my hw as long as it still makes sense.

Just to recap…

MacBook Pro 17:
Pros: 8gb ram, 500gb hard drive, room to put two hard drives if I want, beautiful display, will not lose any money if I upgrade the drive (can put it in another machine a year from now if I upgrade), high resolution 1080p display, great battery life.
Cons: Not very portable / heavy, slower SATA controller technology, system gets extremely hot when GeForce 9600m activated, hard to keep in lap because of bulk, Core 2 Duo lacks HyperThreading and uses much more power than i5/i7.

MacBook Air:
Pros: Super super fast SSD technology, lightweight, fits in any kind of bag, runs very cool, whisper quiet.
Cons: Even though it’s a new system, not much of a gaming machine, somewhat dated 2008 design. Four years have passed… Makes me wonder what’s next, Ivy Bridge is just around the corner.  Screen resolution only 1440 x 900. Fine for 720p but scales down for 1080p.

Update: I opted to stay with my 17″ MacBook Pro, upgraded to a 128gb Crucial m4 from Micro Center for $180 and put my 5400 rpm drive in the optical bay slot using a cheapo kit from Amazon.  So far satisfying until Haswell comes along.

Spam…One annoyance to running your own blog.  I recently enabled Akismet to cut back on the amount of spam I receive.  I was getting on average about 5-10 bogus comments to approve each week.  Most of them had major typographical errors or were intelligible.

“How does it work?

Each time a new comment, trackback, or pingback is added to your site it’s submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down. As a result, you don’t have to waste your time sorting through and deleting spammy comments from your blog.”

A lot of these spammers are using blackhat SEO techniques in order to improve their rankings on the search engines.  Sounds to me like a lot of it is automated and very little human interaction is involved.  I do wonder what the return of investment is in writing a script that just spams blogs.

The most effective projects begin with a plan in mind.  You don’t need to be a Project Management Professional or Digital Marketing Specialist to come up with strategies to be successful at SEO.  Modeling what others have done and tweaking their approach to meet your needs is the quickest way to achieve results without wasting valuable time.  Of course not everyone wants to learn and if this is not an option, hiring someone from the outside to handle SEO can offer a huge return on investment.

Tagging : Using Meta-Tags to describe pages and have crawlers recognize what the purpose of a site really is.  Title and description.

<HEAD>
<TITLE>Mac Geek with an MBA</TITLE>
<META name=”description” content=”Just random ramblings from a Mac Geek with an MBA, ranging from SEO strategies, to technology and automotive news”>

<META name=”keywords” content=”mac, geek, mba, seo, strategies, technology, automotive, news”>
</HEAD>

Content: Content should be new and applicable to your audience.  When content isn’t updated frequently, rankings on search engines will take a hit.

Links : Make sure links aren’t broken during site migrations or any kind of upgrades.  A broken link doesn’t rank well with search engines and for goof reason.  There are a few different strategies that can help create quality back links.  The primary one I would say is through writing articles and linking back to your website.

Map : We’ve heard of HTML (HyperText Markup Language), but what about XML?  XML (Extensible Markup Language) is similar but has different rules.  Without going into too much detail, creating an XML site map through a site like XML Sitemaps Generator, uploading the file to your site and submitting those to search engines can improve rankings.

My site, therealmac.net is built largely around WordPress, a great blogging platform but doesn’t make SEO particularly easy.  I found a solution in a plug-in called:

All in One SEO Pack

Remember whatever platform you’re using, there are tools that can make your life a lot easier.  Utilize them.

SEO is an ongoing process, just because your site has been optimized this month doesn’t mean 3-6 months down the road won’t have to be made.  Though I am not selling any type of product or service right now, I can firsthand that it’s incredibly easy to let content stay stagnant, let a domain name expire and have a domain name squatter take over.  Think about the business impact there if your customers are directed to a website promoting your company and all of a sudden the content is replaced by something offensive in nature.

I read the transcript of a Bill Gates Speech back in 2005 on The Future of Computing.  May have mispronounced some bits, but I find it interesting to see where Bill thought computing was going before Cloud computing and widespread adoption of 64-bit hardware.  Some observations… Longhorn failed and Microsoft dropped the ball on mobile / music, but XBox and Windows 7 have been a home-run.