For a long, long time, I’ve wanted to get my digital life in one place, while still having the power to do what I want.  Oh, and I wanted to be able to carry it everywhere — inside the house, to work, on vacation.

Yeah, I just want everything.  Doable, yes?  Well, not really… until now.

I’ve tried to put everything in one place, and force all my work into one device.  That was with an old MacBook Pro.  I was landlocked at 6GB of RAM, which wasn’t enough to handle my work, and once I started talking about 100,000 images, that pushed me to external drives, which killed my throughput.  Add to that a spinning harddrive inside the laptop, and it wasn’t quite as portable as I’d like.

For power, I moved through an eight-core MacPro, and eventually landed on an eight-core iMac.  That iMac has been great, although the speed for external drives hasn’t been terrific, with Firewire 800 being as fast as it goes.

When the MacBook Airs hit, I picked up one, and it’s been a great “on the go” machine, but definitely not the power nor speed for external storage that I’d like.  Still, it’s a nice machine.

Enter the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display.

This little box seems to have it all.  Internal solid state drive — quick boot, and safe to move the machine quickly, like the MacBook Air.  For external drives, there’s USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt connectors, which are both way faster than Firewire 800 or USB 2.0.  Processor-wise, it’s an eight-core beast with plenty of speed.  It can be custom-built with 16GB of RAM, which is as much as I had on the iMac and is more than enough for my needs.

And then there’s the screen.

I took a look at one at the Apple Store, and was just gobsmacked.  It’s the most amazing screen I’ve seen on a laptop.  The 15″ screen has more pixels than my 27″ iMac had.  And stunning, stunning color.

Notice all the past tense references?  Well, that’s ’cause I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid, and have one of these beauties on order.  Unfortunately, delivery is gonna take a month.  Apparently, they’re flying off the shelves, and Apple can’t make them fast enough.  If you’re Apple, that’s a great problem to have.

Stay tuned… once the little guy shows up, I’m sure I’ll have some comments about it!!!!