I built my first PC in 1999 and have always felt at home in Windows. The entire Windows environment has become second nature to me. I have never had to rely on outside assistance or support to troubleshoot problems and issues. It has been a reliable and productive environment that I feel has never hampered or hindered my productivity. However, for the last two years I have been considering this purchase.

Aesthetically, Macbooks have always had a certain appeal to me. From the unibody construction to the clean simple lines they have a certain elegance and allure that is hard to match. More than that though, the solid build quality of the unibody construction has been something sorely lacking in virtually every windows laptop I have owned for the last decade. Even high end laptop bodies were almost unanimously made of some various concoction of plastic and metal. My current laptop that this will take the place of can be seen below. You can see the reason that Apple decided to forgo the Ethernet port as well as a CD/DVD drive. They simply would not fit in the form factor of the new Retina Macbooks.

I am quite excited to start this new journey and begin to relearn the Mac OS. The last time I used a Mac was during the reign of Photoshop 7.0. The switch to PCI-e SSD drives has bumped up the read and write speeds an incredible amount as well. Looking forward to putting it through its paces soon.

See the pictures below for an unboxing and a size comparison between the Macbook Pro and my Asus bamboo u43jc.

The specs are as follows:

15" Macbook Pro W/ Retina
2.3ghz Intel Core i7
16GB DDR3 SDRAM
512GB PCI-e SSD
2880x1800 IPS display
Intel Iris graphics
Nvidia GeForce GT 750m GPU