I thought it was about time to update my experiences.

I went forward with the Mac Book Pro and I couldn’t be happier. The battery life is outstanding. Light to moderate use results in around 8 hours of battery life. Heavy use, videos, or gaming results in about 4 hours of life. It has come with its own challenges and there is a learning curve when learning OS X after a lifetime of Windows use but it definitively a very well made product.

I’m trying to embrace the Apple ecosystem as much as possible to give it a good and thorough try. I’ve also purchased an Apple TV v2 (ATV2) for the Living Room, I have two Apple Airport Extreme base stations (AEBS) in the house. One serving as the main house router and the other as a media center bridge. I also have a Apple Airport Express in the Master Bedroom for AirTunes use with the bedroom stereo. If Sprint manages to get the iPhone5 here in a few weeks I will also upgrade my 16 month old HTC Evo 4G to an iPhone and unless things change in the tablet arena I intended to pickup an iPad3 when they come out next year. While I don’t purchase a lot of my media from iTunes I make extensive use of tools to transcode the media I already have to iTunes compatible files. Luckily 99% of my media is of superior quality so it transcodes nicely.  I’ve converted a lot of my TV media library to MP4 from MKV for use with AirPlay devices and I intend to convert a select few movie I like to watch a lot to MP4 as well. It means dropping the bit rate from near Blu-Ray (25,000Kbps) to a very low 4,000Kbps but on a phone this won’t be noticeable.

I will continue to update this thread as time progresses. See you around…