As previously mentioned, I recently purchased a new i7 MacBook Pro. I considered getting the 15″ hi-res screen, but decided against it.

An Apple store employee advised me that he considered there to be little noticeable difference between the two versions. I came to a very different conclusion having compared them side by side in store for nearly an hour.

While the menus probably would have been alright, a lot of text is already hard to read due to small font sizes used on many websites. As I didn’t feel like constantly squinting or getting rather close to the screen to read articles on these websites (interestingly enough, the Apple online store was one of the websites I found really hard to read) I opted for a regular screen instead.

So, if you need the extra real estate, by all means, knock yourself out with a 15″ hi-res screen. Otherwise, think very carefully about getting this. If at all possible try before you buy.

Finally, after a long wait for the next MacBook Pros to come out, my patience has paid off: I went down to the Apple store in Chermside, Brisbane, to pick up a brand spanking new i7 MacBook Pro. My previous MBP gave the ghost a couple of months back, and like many people keeping an eye on sites such MacRumours I “knew” that the updated MBPs were imminent.

Wanting to make a near complete switch from desktop to laptop for all of my work, I decided to wait for the faster and relatively cheaper machines to come out.

After buying and swapping a new hard drive, my machine now is a 15″ 2.66 Ghz i7/8gb RAM/7200 rpm (16mb cache) beauty that deals with virtualisation just fine while running every other application that I throw at it.