Opinion - MacBook Pro -is now the time to buy?

Question

I am looking to replace a 2006 MacBook Core Duo 2 Ghz wi 2 GB RAM and a 500 GB drive with either a 15 or 17 MB Pro with Matte screen (4 GB and 500 GB drive). They have the high end 15 and 17 in stock with matte screens at my local Apple Store.
Is now the time to buy?
Three things give me pause so I am looking for some advice.
1. Hard drive related beach balls - especially on 7200 rpm drives.
2. Is the 15 or 17 any more or less prone to these troubles? Is the 5400 rpm 500 GB drive a surer bet?
3. Potential speed bumps to coincide with new cheaper MacBook releases.
Those who have bought recently - is the hard drive beach ball, 30 - 40 second hang issue resolved?
Just generally, would you wait to see if there are any changes to the MacBook Pro specs (a la speed bump) with the impending Mini, iMac, MacBook announcements?
Message was edited by: Joseph Nowak
Message was edited by: Joseph Nowak

Answer 1

For the 15" the time to buy, for me, was before they jettisoned the express card slot My ideal would be a 13" with an express card and the dual graphics chips - oh well I'm not holding my breath for that one. I'm glad I got my 15" while they were still offering express card although I might have been willing to trade that for the smaller footprint of the 13" if it would have been available at the time. I love my 15", but it is big (esp. coming from a 12" PB G4).
As for beach ball speed issues - I think all the shipping MacBook Pro's (at least the 15" and 17") can take 8 gigs of RAM - I would get the base memory from Apple and then upgrade after the fact. I bumped my late 2008 MBP (typing on it now) to it's max of six Gigs RAM and it made a noticeable difference.
And as far as performance, even 7200 rpm notebook drives are slugs compared to their desktop cousins; and compared to the speed increases in every other component in personal computers, mechanical hard drives are glacially slow slugs.
If you really want maximum performance, you need to do what I am getting ready to. Skip the 7200 RPM drive and replace your primary drive with a solid state drive (but do your research - not all SSD's are created equal and some may be slower then a traditional hard drive!). Since I'm not about to pay more for an SSD then the purchase price of my computer, I'm going to get a smaller one (corsair makes a 160GB that looks nice), and remove my optical drive (hardly every use it anyway). In the optical drives place I will put a 500GB drive with one of several kits out there that provide a mounting bracket for the second drive. Best of all worlds - OS and applications on the ultra fast SSD, bulk of my data on the more spacious traditional drive.
CPU and Video are pretty darn fast across the board, even with the base configurations. These days the hard drive is THE speed bottle neck in computers...
Message was edited by: Eric Eskam