I’ve been working with this new MacBook Pro for about 2 months now. I ordered the latest hardware refresh the day that it was released. I’m very happy with it. This new model replaced a 2-year old model which was also the “ultimate” configuration when it was out. One of the things I noticed about the new MacBook was the much faster hard disk. You can really notice the difference when you move to 7200 rpm from 5400 rpm.

I as you can see from an earlier post, I am working on finding the best home for my VMware guest disk file on my MacBook Pro. The LaCie BigDisk Extreme+ is looking like the best choice among hard disks but I wanted to know how the LaCie compares to the internal MacBook Pro drive. I have the latest “ultimate” configuration which includes the 7200 rpm 200 GB drive. This time around, I decided to use the industry-standard Mac benchmarking program XBench.

I remembered a couple of other Mac programs I use pretty regularly. Add these to my other list of Mac software: XBench. This is the standard Mac benchmarking program. It’s freeware and it rocks. It will benchmark your Mac’s CPU, memory, graphics card, and disks. Remote Desktop. The only Microsoft offering I use on the Mac, RD is essential if you need to remote into a Windows machine somewhere. This is great if you are a Window developer (at least some of the time) and need to get into your servers and don’t want to boot up the Windows VM or reboot into Boot Camp.

I recently decided to switch to VMware on my Mac for hosting my Windows installation. I started off with the VM disk image on my MacBook hard disk. I have a MacBook Pro with a 7200 rpm 200 GB hard disk. The performance of the VM was not ideal. Obviously there is disk contention between Mac OS and VWware. But I hesitated to move the file over to an external drive because I didn’t feel an external disk would perform any better.

I am an enterprise application architect. My daily professional work consists of creating architectural documents and writing code in C# using the .NET Framework. But I do all of this on a MacBook Pro using a Parallels virtual machine or, in now rare occasions, the Boot Camp instance. I run Windows Vista Ultimate in the VM. But I only work in Windows when I have to. Even my documentation work is all done on the Mac side now.

I find it ironic in the extreme that probably the best Windows computer in the world is Apple’s Mac Pro workstation. For $2,799 base, you get (2) Intel 64-bit Xeon CPUs, each with 4 cores, 8 memory slots expandable to 32 GB total memory with 2 GB installed, and a bunch of other stuff. We bought one for Ahu to use at home to help speed along her dissertation experiments. Ahu works with massive XML files and those files, when read in, take up lots of memory.

I was talking to Primeaux today and was curious about how many CPU cores he has running in his household. I believe he counted to 20. Now, that’s not surprising, considering he’s a parallel and distributed kind of guy. My own count, though, isn’t far off. 2 cores for my MacBook Pro and 2 core for Ahu’s MacBook Pro. 8 cores for the new Mac Pro. 2 more cores for the iMac in the kitchen.

I ordered a new MacBook Pro last week, the day the new hardware refresh was released. Actually, I spent a bunch of time running around to Apple stores to see if anyone had one in stock but no one did so I had to order mine custom from the Apple store. The computer left Shanghai, China on the 6th and arrived in Anchorage, Alaska today. According to the FedEx tracking system, it has already left Alaska and is en route to me.

After yesterday’s announcement of the new Apple iTunes movie rental service, the stock of Blockbuster tanked 17%. The end is near for those ubiquitous blue and gold stores. Personally, I loathe Blockbuster. Looking for a movie at Blockbuster is right up there with standing in line at airport security in terms of fun for me. I tried out the iTunes movie rentals last night. It took a few minutes to actually find any rentable movies (only 1,000 titles were available on day 1) but after I figured it out, it was trivial.

Apple released the MacBook Air today. It is the world’s thinnest laptop. At it’s thickest, it is thinner than any other laptop’s thinnest. It is a nice boon for the executive traveller who is tired of lugging around extra batteries and a heavy laptop. The MacBook Air weighs only 3 lbs. and has a battery that lasts 5 hours. That’s a long battery life, really. My work laptop (not a Mac) has a 30 minute battery life and weighs 10 lbs.