The new 2012 MBP

Well, ain't this my luck. I haven't even got my brand new MBP (late 2011) as I am watching the Live Coverage of Worldwide Developers Conference 2012 of the new MBP with mind-blowing specs.  And it isn't even that much more expensive. Why I am feeling like a fool?

The plan for system

There are three areas at my home apartment that play key role in designing the system:

1. The hallway cabinets with connection to TV cable for the cable modem, and sufficiently room to hide devices.
2. The living room with home entertainment system.
3. The workstation, where I do the photo and video editing, is a desk located at hallway.

The apartment is not a huge one, but there are lot of concrete walls and very much 2,4GHz traffic in the air. As I wrote in the first blog post, I need to have two access points to secure the wireless connection to all areas. Luckily, there are already two parallel gigabit Ethernet cables (Cat 6, ~25m both) running from the hallway cabinets to living room enabling wired connection between the two access points. What enables me to maintain and use these Ethernet cables, is that they are for the most part nicely hidden inside hallway cabins and the ceilings. 

The primary design criteria (~ User Requirement Specifications) is as follows:

1. Hide the devices (as much as it is reasonable), particularly the big black devices and the cables.
2. Connect the printer to network to enable wireless printing.
3. Good wireless access to and from all locations in the apartment.
4. Keep the existing display, pen tablet, and the scanner at the workplace
5. With reason, utilize existing legacy devices. 
6. Derived from the first design criteria, the pen tablet and the scanner will be stored in the drawers of the workstation desk.

The plan with the available cabling, locations, access requirements and design criteria is as in the following diagram. 

The distance from the Time Capsule to the workstation is less than 2m. However, there is a 20cm concrete wall just in between, and it may be impenetrable for 5GHz wireless connection. I still have hopes that as the distance is so short that the signal can find other route (U-shape) between the workstation desk and the Time Capsule. The plan B is to drill a hole to the closet wall, and place the Time Capsule on the ceiling right above the workstation desk. 

Since placing the Time Capsule on the hallway ceiling  is a major violation of the first design principle, my hunch feeling is that the plan C is significantly more probable than the plan B. The hole in the wall, regardless how well it can be disguised, doesn't improve the odds for plan B.

The components in the hallway cabinets:

• Cable modem - owned by the internet connection provider.
• Time Capsule with:
  - dual band wireless (5GHz and 2,4GHz),
  - router with three LAN ports,
  - 2T network accessible storage for back-ups, and
  - one USB port for e.g. printer or USB drive.
• USB hub to mediate the Time Capsules handicap to have only single USB port. It can be passive USB since the devices I intend to connect to it do not draw any power from the USB connection.
• An existing 500GB NAS for storing the FLAC music files from more than 500 albums, and for other miscellaneous files that do not require any particular back-up.
• An existing 500GB USB for redundant once in month back-up from the most precious photos and video's.
• Canon Pixma IP4700 inkjet printer which fits quite nicely to a cabinet shelf. The printer is an entry model inkjet printer, but I love it because of the relatively true color reproduction. The fact, that it has the cheapest original inks of all mainstream brand inkjet printers, is not that bad thing either. I hope it will still last for a long time since Canon does not any more make printers that would use its economical ink cartridges.

The componets at the workstation/desk:

• MacBook Pro 15" (which of course will be mobile, but the workstation desk is its home).
• 23" NEC MultiSync EA232WMi display, which is more than decent for Lightroom working. The colors I get from the monitor are well reproduced to the Canon Pixma inkjet.
• Wacom Intuos M4 tablet; indispensable while doing more serious Photoshopping.
• Eye One Display 2 monitor colorimeter.
• Canon Lide 80 A4 scanner.
• External 500GB USB powered portable USB 3.0 hard disk that comes with me for photo and video footage storage when traveling. Unfortunately the capability USB 3.0 speed goes in vain with the MacBook Pro.
• External optical drive for the MacBook Pro. The drive will be the one that flies out of the MacBook pro to give space for second internal drive. The housing, as I wrote in the previous blog post, comes from eBay.
• The cameras (Canon 7D, Panasonic TZ5, GoPro), wireless bluetooth travel speaker Jambox by Jawbone, mobile phone (Nokia N8) and some occasional other devices will be used on the workstation as well.
• An active Belkin 7-port USB 2.0 HUB with external power supply to provide power to all connected USB devices.

 The components at living room

• Airport Express for extending the wireless network from the Time Capsule and for streaming music from its analog or optical digital output to my preamp.
• Squeezebox by SlimDevices (currently Logitech) for playing the free lossless compressed FLAC files from the network. It is very nice device, but limited only to my CD collection (as well as CD's that I have had on loan from my friends and bublic library) which then were ripped to computer using Exact Audio Copy (EAC). The jitter free sound quality of the EAC ripped and verified files is superior to what standard CD/DVD/BD players can read. Because of the limitation only to CD's that I have had in my use, lately, I resort to Spotify much more often to get any music I want. The sound quality of Spotify is not on par with Squeezebox and FLAC's but quite OK anyway.

Future options:

• I have an itegrated Intel Atom board + processor that consumes merely 17w. It is not in use Today, but I could make a media server for home entartaiment system of it. I also have an extra 3,5" 500GB hard disk drive that I could use as media file storage. It could be best of using linux on that. I do not know how I could control that linux box remotely via OS X. If anyone has any ideas, I would be grateful to hear about them (yes, I know, I should google it).
• In future it may be that the 2T Time Capsule, 500GB NAS, and 500GB USB connected to Time Capsule do not provide enough storage, back-up capacity, or redundant back-up capacity. Hence I may need to get 4 to 8T NAS into the system.
• With the Linux box and additional NAS, I ran out of the LAN ports in the Time Capsule. Therefore I could get a 5 to 8 port switch for more LAN ports.

Configuring MBP (part 1, HW plans)

In the past I had built three PC's from scratch. I loved it every time. The whole process of designing the PC, comparing processors, graphics cards, motherboards, reading Tom's hardware,  Muro plaza, and numerous other sites,  has been the most enjoyable part of getting the new computer. After all the troubleshooting and tweaks to get the PC up and running, the enthusiasm fades for the new computer, and I find the passion somewhere else (photography, building power amplifier for the home HI-FI system, mountain bike, building a precision motorized router table, designing cyclone dust collection system, 3D modeling the bathrooms and kitchen, measuring living room loudspeakers SPL and frequency response, finding the best portable pressure washer man has built, to name a few).

Would going to MBP mean that I would loose the primary source of enjoyment (=process of building it) of getting an new computer? Not necessarily, thanks to human capacity for self-delusion. I wasn't hard to reason that the out-of-the-box MBP has inadequate performance. Wants to disassemble it, change parts, and reassemble it had nothing to do with the reasoning. I knew that I wasn't satisfied with the performance even before I had gotten the MBP on my hands. In fact, my MBP is still somewhere between my home and the place they dispatch the Macs.

Options for architecture choices and components are numerous when you are building a computer from scratch. With a laptop like MBP, the options are quite limited. Hence, I had to focus only to things that are feasible for my skills, i.e.

1. Adding RAM (which is so trivial that it isn't classified as a tweak)
2. Installing a solid state drive (SSD) to speed up the boot, programs, and about everything which involves the mass storage of the computer; conventionally that is hard disk drive (HDD)

Replacing the HDD with SSD was not really an option because no reasonably priced SSD won't hold the pictures and video files that keep on demanding more and more storage capacity.

• Canon 7D raw format pictures are ~25MB each
• GoPro2 HD video files  (1080p@25fps or 720p@50fps) are ~120GB/min

The HDD that comes with the MBP is 750GB, and it will be adequate for the picture and video files for at least one more year. 2T HDD (or even even better, 2T SSD) would be nice, but it is not really feasible in laptops today. Third demand for the capacity comes from more than 500 albums of music I have (in  FLAC format, ~200GB), but I will store them at an existing 500GB storage NAS box.

As the SSD alone is not sufficient in terms of capacity, I need to find a way of maintaining the HDD in the system. To optimize the best qualities of both (fast read/write of SSD and capacity of HDD), a solution is to dedicate the SSD for the operating system and programs, and HDD for capacity hungry picture and video files. This way the MBP boots and opens the programs faster and has good storage capacity. There are numerous YouTube HDD vs. SSD booting videos like the following one.

Straightforward solution would be to replace the optical drive with a caddy for the SSD. Unfortunately, 6Gb/s Sata 3 drives do not work reliably in the optical bay even on the latest MBP 15" and 17" models. There is a good OWC blog about it. A solution for that is to move the HDD from the main bay to the optical bay, and, install the Sata 3 SSD to the main bay which supports the Sata 3 drives just fine. The HDD in a non Sata 3 supported optical bay should not be a problem since.

Having two disks in the MBP means that  the optical drive goes external. This is not a problem, since eBay is full of very affordable external cases for the MacBook Pro Optibay drives. eBay is also the right place to find a caddy to fit SSD/HDD to the place of the internal optical bay.

The opportunity for further (=future) improvement would be (=will be) sufficiently large SSD which could hold my photo files in it. Today one GB ~1Eur. When this becomes 10GB ~1Eur, it will be no brainer. I am using Lightroom for photo editing. Lightroom reads every time the raw files even when I am viewing the already edited photos. This is because Lightroom has to read the big raw file to render it for the edited result. There is a nice article of SSD and Lightroom performance

- to be continued -

How did I, an avid PC and windows user, decide to go Apple(*)? It is just that one thing led to another. To explain that a bit further, look at the following 10 steps. Or, you can just jump to the next entry in the blog.

1. My transfer from tabletop PC to laptop Apple started from the extensive home renovation project. The renovation was originally planned for bathrooms. After bathrooms were done, it was clear that the kitchen was not on par with the bathrooms. After bathrooms and kitchen, I had no other option than do all the other rooms as well.
   
2. While doing the other rooms, I realized that I need to ditch all the Ethernet cables placed on top of the skirting boards. They were just plain ugly.
3. Without cables, I had to go cableless, or wireless, if you will. 
4. For securing good coverage while going wireless, it was clear that one access point wouldn't provide coverage to all relevant places at home.
5. I realized, that Apple provides an easy solution for two access points with one SSID wireless network via Airport extreme + Airport express. Coincidentally I had purchased an Airport Express already some time ago for the purpose of streaming music from my iPad to my stereo (ok, I admit that I had fell even before the renovation). And then there is this thing called Time Capsule, which is not only full blown wireless router like Airport Express, but it provides the solution for my network storage and printing through network. All in a very competitive price point.
6. In wireless environment, laptop makes more sense than tabletop
7. I still wanted to go for more powerful system than my 5y old E8500 dual core tabletop. Preferably the laptop should be Intel i7 quad core or equivalent.
8. In search for i7 quad core hyper-threading laptops, I first considered some Asus and Acer laptops. However, they were mostly either 17", quite plastic, or both. The Sony Vaio has some nice models and good display, but they are quite pricey already.
9. I had all the time known that MacBook Pro had the performance, the features and even the looks I was searching (my best friend Repe is a true  apple-fan-boy with MBP). Still, I was hesitant because of the brand image. As an engineer, I greatly value the engineering, finishing, and the quality of Apple products, but I didn't see myself as a hipster with scarf and hat, and hanging on the trendy cafés drinking mac(chiato).
10. Setting the negative brand image aside, looking at the features and build quality, I ended up ordering a 15" MBP. After all, there is the boot camp for Win 7 for my savior.

(*) apple = omena in Finnish