3 1/2 Years with the MacBook Pro

It’s been quite a while since I’ve last posted here, as I’ve been quite busy with other things.

But I still have the MacBook Pro from when I started this blog, and here’s a quick update on how it is getting on with life.

Unfortunately, my MacBook Pro really is starting to show its age. Technology has changed quite a lot since it was new, and the 120GB hard drive that it originally came with was not good enough for this day and age. I’ve since upgraded the hard drive to 320GB, and as my warranty has long since expired, that switch has gone very smoothly, and it works perfectly fine with the upgrade.

The super drive, however, is no longer functioning. As soon as a disk is inserted, it is immediately rejected, and that has prevented me from reinstalling Mac OS X, or using anything that is on an optical disk. Since I don’t use many CDs or DVDs, this isn’t a big problem for me, just an inconvenience.

The battery is also a goner. It now lasts around 30 minutes after being unplugged, and the computer can no longer accurately predict the amount of charge left in the battery. Although it may say that 80% of the battery is still remaining, the battery is actually near empty at that level, and the computer will simply drop dead at that point. Which means that I have not used it on battery power for many months now.

However, the rest of the computer is fine. The 15.4″ display is still drop dead gorgeous, and is much better than most laptops on sale today. In fact, it is a lot better than the display sold on MacBook Pros today, simply because it is a matte display instead of glass. Although I do not celebrate Steve Jobs’s retirement from Apple, I hope that his replacement Tim Cook will address the issue of Apple having no matte displays, other than the $150 upgrade on the 15″ and 17″ MacBook Pros.

My system is still running Mac OS X Snow Leopard, as I see no purpose of upgrading to Lion, which seems to be more of a user interface upgrade than any actual software improvements. Everything on my Mac runs as normal; everything works without many glitches, and any flash intensive website still causes the mac to overheat. The fact that so many hours of overheating has not killed the computer is a testimony to Apple design, and although the heat is an issue, it at least does not prevent the user from using any of the mac’s functions.

To conclude, the MacBook Pro is still my main computer. Although I am thinking of replacing it–due to form factor–it works perfectly fine, and is an icon for Apple design.

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