31 12 2016

I would have loved to upgrade to a new macbook pro this year. Unfortunately, Apple made it quite unattractive (to say it in a very diplomatic way ^^). I have been working for years now on a MBP mid-2012 (previously early 2011), hires matte display, 16GB ram, 1TB flash drive. So in order to get similar specs but with a 2TB flash drive, it would cost me 4999,- euro for the max’d out 15″ 2016 model. Thats kinda ridiculous, as you have to spend money for several dongles on top. And they’ve killed MagSafe. Nuts! And i do hate dongles. Also, spec-wise my 4 year old machine was STILL at least comparable to the top of the line 2016. Nevertheless, i really wanted to have a smaller and lighter laptop. While i think the MBP 2016 is a stunning machine and it just looks georgious, it comes with too many quirks and drawbacks. Luckily there are good alternatives. MBP 2015 would be a good choice, for example. But: I went for a max’d out thinkpad t450s. Full HD IPS matte display (for me as a coder easily enough), 20GB ram, 1TB flash, i7, fingerprint reader, smartcard, optional lte modem. It still has got a swappable battery, performance is similar to the newer t460s and the prices were very attractive for a maxed out version. It’s light too (lighter than my wife’s 13″ retina macbook pro). While the single core speed is en par with my old laptop, the multicore performance is obviously slightly slower than the MBP 2012 because t450s is using i7-5600U that has 2-cores (4 threads), as opposed to the 4-core (8 threads) cpu from the MBP 2012. Nevertheless, it’s easily fast enough to run 2 VMs and there is plenty of RAM, so i was fine with that. Power efficiency is stunning: i could get the overall power consumption below 4 watts idling with minimum display brightness.

First i thought i’d keep the macbook in case i would want to go back. After two weeks being fully productive it’s pretty clear: there is no way back! Currently i’m reinstalling the MBP and getting it prepared for sale. Farewell, dear MacBook Pro – we’ve had a great time … And: Steve, we’re missing you.

Running Apple OSX 10.12.2 macOS Sierra in VM VMware workstation player under GNU/Linux Elementary OS Converting a Parallels Desktop or Virtualbox VM to VMware Workstation/Player using Converter Standalone