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My first 2 not so happy years with a Retina MacBook Pro

My first 2 not so happy years with a Retina MacBook Pro

I consider myself a relatively new Apple Mac OS X user. I am a technology freak, I love everything around it and I am the point of reference of most of my family and friends when it comes to computers and tech stuff. I write about technology, love to do research and work in IT Service Management in a big company.

At work, I use a Windows 7 computer and at home I use a Retina MacBook Pro Late 2013 15″ notebook. I had to have the experience that everybody was talking about: “Mac is great”, “I love my Mac”, “Everything is so stable”. So when I decided to buy it, I went for the best model available. The extra graphics card, the 16 GB of RAM, the 512 SSD, everything, spending a wooping almost USD 3.000. It was a lot of money and it still is.
Since then, I am trying to feel happy with my investment and with the new experience of “The Mac” and to be honest I still can’t find any joy besides looking at the thing.

I guess working at the office with a Windows computer and arriving home trying to use the Mac, doesn’t help either. I did install BootCamp and Parallels with a virtual machine running Windows, but I forced myself to use OS X since around November 2013 until today (March 2016) for most of the things I do. (more…)

Microsoft LifeCam Studio webcam on Mac OS X

Microsoft LifeCam Studio webcam on Mac OS X

I was struggling with my Microsoft Lifecam Studio webcam because it was not working properly.

I have a Retina MacBook Pro 15″  (late 2013) and I test the camera with the PhotoBooth app on Mavericks. All I was able to see was a super burned white-colored image.

After researching online for solutions I came across this program on the App store that costs USD 8. I must say, it was worth it, because from the moment I installed it, the problem was solved. Now I am able to use my camera without any troubles. (more…)

Retina MacBook Pro, how to manually switch video cards and save battery

Retina MacBook Pro, how to manually switch video cards and save battery

73486I purchased the latest MacBook Pro retina in November 2013, its the 15″ version which has two video cards on it, an Intel Iris and an Nvidia 750M if I recall correctly.
Its nice to have two video cards because you can do more graphic hungry stuff without having to use another computer, but there are times where you really need as much battery as possible, and you don’t want any application to trigger the power hungry Nvidia 750M. (more…)