The Right Tool, or a Shiny Toy?

I’ve written before about how I feel about Apple products, despite the fact that I use them. For now let’s just say it’s a mixed bag, but I have reasons for using a Macbook Air 11” for fiction writing. That’s what I’ve been using all along. It’s smallish, somewhat light, and perhaps more importantly, has no hard drive to crash. But it’s poor in terms of ports, among other failings.

Now they’ve put out a model that’s twice as big, twice as heavy, and more than twice as expensive: the MacBook 15” with Retina Display, or similar name. It has an exceptionally high-resolution screen, though oddly it’s not a touch screen when they clearly have the technology to do that well using exactly the same components. It’s got better ports than I’d expect from Apple (including 2X USB 3.0), an SDXC slot legitimately useful for photography, the same awful keyboard, and the same size SSD as I have now (there’s a slightly larger one in the insane high-end model which is even more outrageously priced). Also a pretty good, though not top-notch gaming card, which I could really only use if I installed Windows dual-boot, wasting a lot of premium SSD space in the process. And of course, no blu-ray (or any internal disc)—I read Jobs didn’t like them for some reason, finding them technically untidy or something, so the company’s employees started spouting nonsense about how you can just download everything including the highest-resolution video you could ever want.

So why am I considering getting one?

Lately I’ve felt that the amount of real estate on the screen has been a problem for things like outlining and referring to notes. The high-resolution, larger screen would let me arrange more resources on the screen at once. It would also be much better for any sort of photo work, since I’ve been doing that at a more pro-ish level than ever before. Also if I someday get back to writing music, it’s more powerful and has a better screen for it.

On the other hand, I can solve these problems in other ways and probably should. I also know they will put out a better version in six months and I’ll wish at that time that I’d waited. Also, the system setting regarding the screen’s resolution is bizarre and misleading, and I still don’t understand it. Also I’d need to use a different bag to carry the thing, since it would be about 4” larger diagonally and almost twice as thick.

So far I’ve resisted.