Dropped Our Landline

In looking at our bill for our landline it was $60 a month.  We received 98.96087% of our calls from people wanting our money or to ask us who we were voting for.  The only reason to keep the landline was ADT.  When I found out that ADT had a cell service option for $5.83 a month that did not use either the landline or the Internet, I realized that was the best solution because both the landline and the 75ohm coaxial cable that comes into the house for our Comcast 150Mbs down and 25Mbs up could both be easily cut outside our house.

I just need to clean up the plates where the old landlines are at so it looks professional.  I find it hard to believe that the next purchaser of our house will want a landline, but you never know.

It has been very nice to not have a phone ringing every night from people or organizations we have zero desire to talk to.

For those who know us, just call us on our cells.

My New MacBook Pro 2016 versus my 2010 MacBook Pro Comparison

Five and half years ago I purchased a:

• 2010 MacBook Pro 15" screen
• 2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 8GB RAM
• 500GB hard drive (spinning rust type) - I had to upgrade from the 250 GB when I was cut off in traffic in CA and had to make an emergency swerve which caused my briefcase in my trunk to go flying from one side to the other and it killed my drive.  I changed the inside of the briefcase so it now has padding around all parts of the computer.  I doubt that will happen again, but why push my luck.

A month ago I purchased:

• 2016 MacBook Pro 15" screen
• 2.8GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 (Turbo Boost up to 4.0GHz) with 6MB shared L3 cache.
• 16GB RAM
• 1TB PCIe-based flash storage

I did a quick test this morning doing a restart of each computer.

The 2010 MacBook Pro did a complete restart (it did a shutdown and then started the system back up again) where I was logged in with the apps all up and running  in 4 minutes and 22 seconds or 262 seconds.

The 2016 MacBook Pro did a complete restart (it did a shutdown and then started the system back up again) where where I was logged in with the apps all up and running in 41 seconds.

Being 514.63 percent faster { (262-41)/41  (formula per Patterson and Hennesy) } is well worth the investment and I probably should not have waited so long.

That might NOT sound like a lot if you are not traveling 100% of the time and constantly restarting your computer or trying to check your email, start up a number of apps or run VMWare between meetings, but trust me, it is a BIG deal. More importantly, EVERYTHING is faster and I estimated that the new MacBook Pro is saving my over an hour each and every day.  It runs at the speed of thought :-)

The same day I bought the one above, I purchased the exact same model for my youngest son Tim who is in his final year at JMU majoring in computer science.  The Apple salesperson said to Tim, "you have a very nice father who would buy the fastest MacBook Pro that we sell."  I had Tim put in $750 of his own money so he had some skin in the game.  If you have never purchased anything from Apple, it is the best experience you can possibly have for an in store experience.