One of the perks at my full-time employeer is the ability to do an employee computer purchase during the year. With just 15% down, the company will finance the rest of a computer and payroll deduct the remaining amount from your paycheck. In addition, they usually get pretty decent discount because of quantity with the various vendors.
After the offer of the computer purchase plan was made last year, several of us contacted our internal HR person who coordinates this and asked that she try and add Apple computers to the plan. Thanks to her hard work, we were able to get a Mac this year on the plan. I don’t think the response has been huge and I think my order was the first processed and to arrive, but there is a lot of interest.
Within my department, there is a fairly good following for Macs. I know we have two converts who are purchasing their first Mac this year through the employee plan. There are two more that are seriously considering it.
Yesterday, my MacBook Pro arrived and I got the call from our supply department to come and pick it up. I took it back in the help desk and it was like Christmas for all of us. Everyone got to look and watch me unwrap the power up the laptop for the first time. I have it at work again today… I just couldn’t bring myself to leave it at home. Poor thing doesn’t need to be left all alone!
But seriously, I’m liking it a lot. I ordered the base model MacBook Pro but customized it with 4GB of RAM. The dual video cards are a very cool concept and the ability to switch between them is great to conserve battery life. I, of course, switched to the performance setting instead so I’m running on the NVidia 9600M GT card right now and loving life. I really need to move my Photoshop and some other apps over to this laptop and seriously give the graphics card a workout.
Oh, and I’m sure its been noted elsewhere, but this MacBook Pro shipped with OS X version 10.5.5, which I don’t think has been released to the wild yet via software update. I though that was a little interesting.
