As you can see from the image below I am getting bloody good battery life times.  Now granted this is with the screen brightness ~33% – Still this is the average time I have been getting first thing in the morning whilst on the train.  When I get to the office and up the brightness, move files around etc the lifetime drops to ~5 hours.  But that still in itself is impressive. Isn’t it?

Yay! > 9hrs on the new toy

So far it has been awesome.  I am currently in the throws of getting my hands on a bunch of software to allow me to do what I would normally be able to do on any of my PC’s.  I have found a few good apps, and I continue to find more.  But if you have any must-have apps, then please to tell.

I have been craving a Mac for quite some time now, and it has taken a very long time to be able to justify the cost.  But needless to say now that I have it I am in love.  It has been rebooted a total of 3 times since I first turned it on.  These were all for updates.

So far I have:

• OpenOffice
• iLife
• TextMate
• iTerm (not sure if prefer this to terminal.app or not, yet)
• Lock Desktop
• PGP
  other misc stuff

So far most folks have been asking me about the battery life, does it really last 8 hours.  So far, no. But it has lasted just shy of 7 hours 2 or 3 times already.   This is with the screen on just about 50-60% brightness and no use of the DVD drive etc.  How incredible is that?  One full working day near as damn it on one full charge.

So, moving on I intend to get rid of all my PCs at home, and eventually have just this MackBook and one PowerMac, or iMac depending on if we want to have more than one screen.

• Around me
• Twitterific
• Tube deluxe
• TV Plus (remote record for sky)
• WordPress (this was written using this)
• TouchTerm
•. Facebook
• Flixter (Local cinema)
• Beer deluxe (international beer list)

I’m sure many more will follow as time goes on.

Right, for the past few weeks I have been trying to get my hands on a 17″ MBP. Not the standard retail model, I want the smaller but faster disk, more RAM, and a few other tweaks.

In the UK (apple.com/uk) retail price for this unit is about £2,200. However in the US the same spec will typically retail for about $2,150. That is near as damn it half the price of the UK model. Now I know that the UK (and EU) has steep import taxes for goods, but this does not justify the 100% difference in price.

So, Apple. Why oh why, are you so expensive over here? I mean your pricing is so exhorbantly high that drive people to look for alternate methods of getting their grubby little mits on the toy that they want.

The price for me is so vast, I could probably take a week long trip to the US, buy it locally there, and bring it back with me. With enough change for a cup of tea at LHR.

Does anyone have any ideas? The wife is struggling to see how a £2k+ laptop is value for money, unless it can clean the house, and cook.

This is by no means the only tale of Apple hiking up prices as soon as their products hit the shelves ok UK resellers. In fact Apple are not the only US brand to do this. Levi jeans are another good example. But these are not just 100% more expensive, during my last visit stateside they were near enough 350% more expensive.

It’s things like these that make you wonder if your future lies in the Country in which you were born. Don’t even get me started on the state of the UK political climate, it is worse than feeding time at the Zoo of late.