New i7

That’s geek-speak for new 27″ iMac, baby! The i7 designates one of Intel’s newest quad-core processors, so this sucker is fast. It makes my two-and-a-half-year-old MacBook Pro feel like a dinosaur. Also, the 27″ LED monitor is big, bright, and beautiful.

I was originally going to replace the MBP with a new one. Since I bought my current one in November of 2007, the product line has had significant upgrades. Perhaps the most noticeable is their carved aluminum bodies. I really think the reason why my MBP’s keyboard and trackpad died is because of the flimsy body. The difference between new and old is like the difference between the old and new iPods.

While the new MBPs are very nice, I simply needed more room to edit photos. I have been doing a lot of photography work lately, and I really needed a machine with the processor to handle it, plus the screen real estate to allow me to see details. The iMac does both of these very well: Aperture works well on this machine. I would still like to see it move faster, but it is a pro application, so there’s a lot going on under the hood. Its workspace looks beautiful on the iMac’s monitor. This machine is perfect for photo editing; now I just have to teach myself to use Final Cut.

I do miss having a portable Mac. One of the drawbacks to the iMac is that it has to live in the office. This is not such a great drawback now, since we cleaned the office, but I enjoy sitting in front of the tube while working, MBP resting on my lap.

The old MBP will be acting as the home server. I installed Snow Leopard Server on it this morning, and it’ll probably take me a few days to get it totally configured. I must admit: I do miss the Ubuntu server I was running, but the machine I was using was just too loud. While the Mac Server software has come a long way, I still prefer the ol’ Debian command line approach to administration. However, 10.6 server looks pretty bad-ass already. It has a pretty powerful web server built-in, complete with wiki, blog, address, and calendaring functions. This could be a cool family server.

OK, back to work. I still have some configuring to do.

It's so BIG!