So after much anticipation, many tireless weeks of spec checking and a whole bunch of money I was really glad to be on the receiving end of a brand spanking new 17” MacBook Pro!

Although it has been less than 72 hours this is (so far) truly the most amazing piece of computer equipment I have ever owned, honestly worth every single cent! The initial setup was completely flawless and only took a few minutes. The graphics, resolution and performance are exceptional, in fact I haven’t even had to switch over from the standard “on-board” video card to the higher end controller yet, despite putting the GPU through a thorough beating, testing out the Quake 4 demo :P

The specs in this machine are as follows:

• Intel® Core™2 Duo CPU T9600 @ 2.80GHz
• 4GB RAM
• 500GB 5400rpm hard disk
• 17” - 1920 x 1200 native resolution

I plan to upgrade the memory to 8GB and the drive to the 7200rpm model sometime in the future.

Here are a few more (slightly better quality) pics:

The rest of the network.

From the left, OpenBSD 4.5 gateway, proxy and firewall, ADSL router and OpenWRT wireless router on top of the 3com gigabit switch. The main workhorse (storage, virtual machines and build zones) is underneath that with a quad core processor, 4GB of RAM and just over 2TB of disk space in 2 ZFS pools (3 x 500GB and 3 x 640GB) running OpenSolaris and finally 2 x 2kVA UPSs.