Snow Leopard Upgrade Time?

I was supposed to receive my copy of Snow Leopard to upgrade my Macs today. I was away when delivery was attempted, and it requires a signature. Probably a good thing. I think I need to hold off on the upgrade on my laptop at least.

This software compatibility list shows that I may have a few problems. Lots of things are working, and CS3 issues about whether it works or not appear to be resolved. But there are a couple of key items that have issues still. VM Ware Fusion, and TrueCrypt still have issues. They will need to be fixed for sure before I upgrade.

Lightroom is supposed to work, and I just got an Aperture update to make it compatible, so that covers the photography stuff I use. I wonder if there are plugin issues?

Make sure you do a survey of all your software before you pull the plug on the upgrade.

Update: Looks like MacFuse, which TrueCrypt uses to overlay the encrypted volumes is the real culprit. Version 2.0.3 is what I have installed. There is another beta build called 2.1.5, but not sure what it brings. There is a change log , but it wasn’t updated since v2.0 in 2008. Hmmm…

The Traveling Photographers Laptop?

Apple MacBookPro 13 inch

Apple released some new hardware on Monday. I always get psyched when that happens. Well, sometimes it is just a speed bump, and a “what ever”, but Monday has some interesting things introduced.

The 13″ MacBook, the one with the aluminium case got promoted to a MacBookPro. They get to charge more for the laptops with a “Pro” at the end. 😉 You can compare the the different models at Apple here. It did get firewire 800 and a new non removable battery that Apple claims to get up to 7 hours of life. Wow, that would be cool.

Right now I have a 15″ MacBookPro, and it can feel a little big and heavy to carry around. The 13″ is 4.5lbs, and the 15″ is 5.5lbs. I think mine is a little heavier than that. The question though, is does the 13.3″ screen at 1280×800 and only a NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor cut it for image editing. Granted, this wouldn’t be designed to be the main image processing machine, but still… how big a trade off is it. We will have to wait and see what people think of the 9400M and running Photoshop/Lightroom/Aperture on it.

So I headed over to the Apple store, and I configured a 13″ MacBookPro with the 2.53Ghz processor (faster one), 4gig of ram (default), and 256Gig of solid state hard drive. Total: $2299. Yes, that’s right, a SSD. Living on the edge. You could get the 128Gig version and get the cost under $2000. I think that a SSD for travel would be a great option. No worry about moving parts, and they are generally a touch faster.

Still, $2000 for a laptop is still kind of expensive, but you could go with the regular 250Gig hard drive and the price is on $1499. Sounds much more palatable, but dang…. I want the SSD…

I won’t be rushing out to get one anyway. First of all, my current laptop keeps going and going and going. It is only a little over two years old, but I bought a refurbished model, so I was a bit behind the tech curve when I got. But the dang thing just works. I have installed Leopard, Aperture 2.1, Photoshop CS3, and it runs just fine. After a couple of years on a windows machine, I was already cursing those laptops. This MacBookPro, still works just fine. Sigh… no good compelling reason to upgrade. 

The other reason is that I always buy refurbished. I have an iPod, an iMac, and the MacBookPro that I have purchased refurbished. They have all worked out fabulously. I have saved quite a lot by doing that. So, if I was going to get one, I would wait for the next speed bump, and pick one up from the refurbished site. I wonder if any 13″ models with a SSD will show up there…

Aperture Update

Apple updated the software to 2.1.2 a couple of days ago. For just a moment I was quite excited. I thought that maybe Apple had updated Aperture to handle RAW files from a D90. Nope, Apple just says it updates book printing. Yippee. It was a little silly to dream of an Aperture update adding RAW D90 support. That will come as an OSX Core Image update, and then Aperture will be able to support it, just like the any other Mac application. What would have been a great update would have been the ability to do graduated ND filters in software like Lightroom now can. I guy can dream.