I had a plan. I took a detour. I now own a Macbook Pro. (Macbook Pro 15″ 2.66GHz i7 with 4GB RAM)

First impressions:

• Love the way it looks and feels
• Keyboard is marvelous. Soft and yet gives really good feedback. The backlight works great as well
• After initial reservation, I love the new trackpad. The smooth iphone like scrolling is just fantastic!
• Not sure about the glossy screen. I end up turning up the brightness in order to see past the reflections
• Battery life hasn’t been that impressive. Gives me about 4-5hrs I think. It hasn’t given me the “ph, wow! you still have some juice left” moment, yet.
• Performance has been fine, again, don’t feel like there’s a big jump from the old Macbook Pro I was using. Don’t feel any difference in the app launch times, or data transfer. I haven’t run any CPU intensive apps yet though.
• The base gets really heated sometimes. Way more than the older Macbook Pro. Especially on the left side. I hate this about laptops.

When I say, I don’t feel a big difference what I mean is that although it might be a faster when you measure using a stop watch, but it doesn’t make me feel so. It’s too early to complain about it though. I should say, it hasn’t given me any kind of problems whatsoever. But, it definitely hasn’t made me feel like, lets say, how I felt when I first installed 2GB of memory after using 512MB, back in 2004.

Happy with it. Hope it can work as a desktop machine for my photo-editing needs when I need it to. Looking at my current plans and some new developments, that won’t happen anytime soon. I might be city hopping for a fair bit of this year – hence the decision to buy a laptop, instead of the iMac.

So, in reply to mi amigo, Roberto Mateu, this won’t change the initial plan to use specialized tools for specific tasks. The Macbook Pro is solving my new-big problem (a portable workstation), which is what a laptop is supposed to do. As for the iPad, lets see how this changes things and we’ll get back to that in a bit.