New MBP drool-worthy, but patience prevails
Yesterday Apple unveiled their new MacBook Pro, featuring a LED backlit display and the new Intel “Santa Rosa” platform. These on their own are pretty nice updates, but my first gen 2.16 dual core is still humming along just fine. While it would be nice to upgrade, I really have no need to at the moment. Plus, Leopard isn’t out yet, and until it is there is no real practical reason to do it now. Even once that OS update comes out my system will still be capable (though I’ll probably drop a little more RAM into it at that point).
Point is, each update that Apple does makes the system just that much cooler. While I could sell my machine for probably $1,000 easily (maybe more like $1,200 even) and not have to spend that much on a new one, it’s better to wait, especially because I’m trying to save money for a house.
I have this vision of what computing will be like once I get my own place. I’ll have my PC of course - probably with Windows XP on it still - most likely in the “computer/music room” of the basement. That’s where I’d do all my PC-ish things: work on my Microsoft development (Mac fan or not a large part of the work I do is with Microsoft technologies), play the occasional PC game, work on my musical endeavors, etc. Upstairs in the “office” there will be a nice, large, open desk with one large (I’m talking 30″) display and a wireless keyboard/mouse. To this I’d hook my MacBook Pro, which at this point I’d consider my primary system. Having it portable would be great for going to the couch, or even taking it downstairs to hook it to music equipment, but the office would just be reserved for day-to-day computing tasks, as well as all my normal non-Microsoft development work.
Tying it all together from the basement would be the home server. I’d probably run some linux variant; probably Ubuntu. This would be a new box that would have only a moderate amount of horsepower, but be focused on power efficiency and silent-running. It’s main task would be file storage, en masse. I’m talking 1 TB of striped, mirrored storage and I’d like to be able to expand to 2 TB. I’ve dodged the bullet regarding backups for about four years now, and I can just feel the clock running short, so I need a proper centralized storage location that I can also burn archive media from. Other ideas for what I could do with this computer would be media server, phone server, and web/app/db server (for dev purposes). I’m not really looking forward to setting up the SAMBA server that I’ll need so that all my computers can talk to it… I tried to make one about five years ago and failed horribly. I can only hope it has gotten somewhat better since then. (Probably not.)
Anyway, that’s my vision. I actually want to put as much forethought as possible into making this a system that can be sustained for a long period of time, as well as upgraded relatively easily. I’ll also want to properly wire my whole house for network, but seeing as my good friend Matt did that to his own place (in fact, this whole system is similar to what he’s done at his place) I’m sure I could talk him into showing me the ropes.
