So I finally bought a new Mac. My old Macbook Pro was an Early 2008 model and has gotten fairly old (well 5 years old to be precise). It's still a solid laptop, but with a dodgy power conector, useless battery, unreliable optical drive, and an entire line of dead pixels down the screen it was not worth repairing.

I wanted something more portable than my previous system. At 15" and 2.6kg it wasn't the biggest, but it was certainly no Macbook Air. I was torn between the small form factor of an Air or the power of a Retina Macbook Pro.

After tinkering with configuration options on the Apple site, it was clear the 13" Retina was the laptop for me, and I couldn't have been more right! It's a lovely machine, and here's why.

Form factor

The tiny form factor (which is actually a smaller footprint than the 13" Macbook Air) is great. It weighs a full kilogram less than my last laptop and it shows. I can feel happy throwing it in my bag in the morning without having to wonder if I'm really going to need it.

Going down to 13" from 15" has meant that writing on the bus, or even just sitting on the sofa at home is a much more comfortable experience.

The screen

Wow! The Retina display is lovely. Admittedly this was one of the more "nice to have" features, and didn't contribute much to my buying decision, but what can I say, it's brilliant.

I do have one niggle with the Retina display though. I really do dislike having no advanced options to choose an actual resolution from the display preferences. I know there are apps out there such as QuickRes and SwitchResX, but it's nice not to have to rely on third party apps for something so basic.

The SSD

What used to take minutes now takes split seconds. On my previous Mac, I would recoil in horror if I accidentally clicked the iTunes or iPhoto icons; I'd then to force quit as quickly as possible before the OS ground to halt. Now iTunes (my personal favourite benchmark for bloatware) loads in a mere second.

It's also a dream at boot time. I couldn't resist doing a speed comparison. My old Macbook Pro took 3 minutes and 6 seconds to get to the desktop, where as my new Retina took just 15.9 seconds.

I'll have to get used to having a little less disk space, but with iCloud, iTunes Match and Dropbox Camera Uploads it's a lot easier.

If you have a laptop of any kind, get yourself an SSD. Prices have come down massively in the last few years.

The Battery

This ones fairly obvious. My battery actually works! Though Apple advertise 7 hours wireless web, so far I seem to get about 4 or 5. That's not a problem for me, compared to the 20 to 30 minutes I would get previously this is a dream. I might be able to squeeze an extra hour from it, if I didn't always have my backlight set to 100%.

Summary

All in all I'm very happy. I've done more writing, and coding in the last week than I have in the last 2 months, and I think being able to rely on my laptop not crashing, lagging, overheating or dying is a big reason for that.

Oh and it's not once gotten hot, I'm not even sure I would describe it as warm; that's a very welcome change.