The saga started in January when I received my MacBook Pro charger and charging cable. A few days later, another USB-C dongle showed up. Now in April, my USB-C dongle life is full with the ThunderBolt and Ethernet adapters.

This past week, our receiving department informed me that I had a package. I went to pick up my new MacBook Pro and found this.

Yup, that’s it. Whenever I order a laptop, I always buy a spare power adapter, and that’s what arrived, not the actual MacBook Pro. No word when that’s arriving…

After Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference announcement of updated MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros, I was hoping for a new iMac announcement. There was none. Then I got to thinking maybe I didn’t need a desktop form factor after all. I mean what is an iMac but a laptop with a bigger screen.

With the Ivy Bridge architecture and quad-core i7 processors, the new Retina display MacBook Pro will be significantly faster than my iMac with Core 2 Extreme processors. My main uses would be blogging, working with photos, and fiddling with videos in iMovie. Right now, working with Aperture, iMovie, and even iPhoto is such a drag, it takes the fun away from using my Mac. I dread having to offload images off a memory card since this will hog my machine for minutes (seriously).

But then comes all my legacy peripherals. I have external USB devices, a Firewire 400 drive, a Firewire 800 Drobo, and a USB 3.0 drive. Would I get a Thunderbolt Display to act as a dock and “Thunderbolt converter?” Does the Thunderbolt display support USB 3.0 and MagSafe 2?

At work, I don’t need as much horsepower since I no longer work with pictures and video as much. It’s more Office productivity, email, and online content creation. Is a MacBook Pro with Retina display needed for these tasks? Not so much. While I do carry around my 15-in MBP, it’s out of necessity, not convenience. Would I want a MBP for home and one for work? That’s kinda silly, but I’m not going to mix work and home stuff so two machines is a must.

How about a MacBook Air? I love the space of a 15-in screen and am afraid of an 11-in screen, reminding me of the days of my Mac SE. But that 13-in Air should be livable. I’d want to bump up the processor and RAM, but this configuration is attractive. I’d much rather tote an Air in the office, and I wouldn’t feel silly having two MacBook Pros for different functions.

After writing this post, I think I have my plan.

First the good news. When it shipped, this model supported 4GB of RAM. Then it was discovered that the machine was still stable with 6GB of addressable memory. This meant one 4-GB module paired with one 2-GB module, giving a total of 6 GB. Not bad, but when Apple released Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6, they also supplied a firmware update for some machines. This firmware update had an undocumented change which consequently raised the RAM ceiling to a full 8 GB.

To replace the internal hard drive is easy since the drive is very accessible. The Late 2008 MBP can handle SATA2-speed drive throughput. But… don’t try to future proof the purchase of a replacement drive, especially if you’re looking at the newer Solid State Drives (SSD). Some SSD drives that operate at SATA3 speeds (6Gb/s) are not fully compatible with this MBP and instead of downspeeding to SATA2 speeds, these fast SATA3 drives run at SATA1 speeds! That’s a big waste of a fast SSD, so don’t do it. Go with the slightly cheaper SATA2 drives.

Besides the unfortunate SATA compatibility, the Late 2008 MBP has a well-known but unacknowledged hardware issue based on its graphics chip set. The problem manifests itself in random blinking of the top third of the built-in display. While not destructive, this bug is very irritating, and there’s no clear fix. On the Apple Support Communities, replacing the logic board is the usual course of action but that doesn’t always lead to a fix. In fact, several board replacements is sometimes followed by a whole computer swapout. I haven’t reached that extreme yet, but it’s sad there is no clear way to solve this.