It Pays to Buy Quality

Well, my year-and-a-half wait is finally over...almost.  When I saw my first Retina MacBook Pro last year, I knew I had to have one, but just didn’t want to lay out the money at the time. I’ve been completely spoiled by the retina displays on my iPhone and iPad, so my 2009 17" MBP's 1920 X 1200 display just wasn't doing it for me any more. It's a bit like having Flounder Almandine for lunch then coming home to fish sticks for dinner. But it's more than just the display showing signs of age. In a little over four years, Apple (and the rest of to computer industry) has progressed light years beyond the Core2 Duo, USB 2, no Thunderbolt seventeen-incher that was top-of-the-line in July of '09. Like back then, as soon as Apple refreshed the MBPs last week, I ordered the most powerful model available with all the options.

The shiny, new 15.4" Retina MBP should arrive Wednesday with the fastest Intel Haswell CPU, discreet graphics, as much RAM (16 GB) as Apple will install and a full terabyte of flash storage. It's not because I'm spoiled. Well, maybe a little bit, but after 30 years in this business I've come to understand that the only way to get four years use out of a computer is to buy the latest model stuffed with as much speed, memory, graphics and storage as you can get. This strategy is even more important today given Apple's propensity to make fewer and fewer of their laptop's components user-upgradeable. This latest MBP model has no user-replaceable parts and iFixIt.com gives the new Retina MacBook Pros a score of 1 out of 10 for ease of repair (with 10 being easiest). In other words, don't buy what you need, buy what you think you may need four or five years from now. Another take-away from all this: Buy quality. It's worth it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with my current MBP. It has served me well for 51 months, but it’s getting just a bit dated for my professional needs. I plan to give it to my wife who will likely be very happy with it for three of four more years given her more typical use demands. After all, it does have 8 gigs of RAM, a 512 GB SSD and I just updated it to Mavericks with all the new iLife and iWork apps and it runs them all great. You can never expect to do that with a "BestBuy special" PC. This example speaks volumes in favor of buying quality. Mr. Shawn Blanc codifies this philosophy quite succinctly.

Yes, I’m spending what some PC people would think is an eye-popping amount for my new MacBook Pro. A similarly-equipped Dell or HP would cost 15 - 20% less, but after adding Office, a good photo manager and movie maker (like what comes included with iWork and iLife) the savings are much less and you still end up with a Windows computer at the end of the day. In my opinion, that fact alone makes it inferior.

Tweet