Dateline Richmond, VA
I will fess up that I have been behind the laptop curve for a while. Eight years to be precise. My last one, and still a stalwart but bulky friend, was a Dell 8100 I picked up in August of 2001. It has seen lots of travel, been through 4 hard drives at $250 a pop and had two screens. Total investment: $6000usd give or take. Sheesh.
So I started looking for replacements last Summer, after falling in love with the ASUS EEE PC A client loaned me while teaching a class in Jamaica. Very cute. Only $299, runs Linux, fits in a pocket and boots up in under 15 seconds. Plus it has all the apps preloaded (all open-source, natch).
By the end of the week I was actually getting used to the tiny little keyboard and screen and was very much interested in the NetBook route. Upon my return I started studying up and found that ASUS had an array of higher end Netbooks, the top end of which at the time had a 10" screen, larger keyboard and lots of great built-in features. You could even get it with XP on it. But the price was over $600. That put it within striking range of the low end but still very powerful full-size laptops.
So I studied all of them. Read reviews. Visited stores and played with them. Still, there were a couple things I couldn't stand. One was the prospect of getting a machine running the heinous Vista O/S. I have extra copies of XP I scored through a friend at Microsoft in anticipation of a day when they would no longer be available. So I could potentially buy a Vista box then attempt at lobotomizing it, scraping out the Vista weirdness and replacing it with XP. Yechh. Not fun.
Then in August, I had the opportunity to spend a few weeks with a MacBook Pro. What a sweet machine. Leopard is an operating system the way God intended one to be. It is actually BSD Unix underneath, which gives me great confidence, being an old Unix guy dating back to the mid-80's.
While I didn't jump on it straight away, I had the opportunity to spend more time with Macs at a buds house and really took Leopard to town, examining all its components and ending up being damn impressed.
Knowing September would bring a new announcement from Apple on their laptop line, I waited to see what they would unveil. And they didn't disappoint. The new MacBookPro offered a single-piece body, a very thin glass screen (and no matte option), and a few other features I can't recall at the moment. But they had no announcement for their 17" models, to my disappointment.
I waited and continued studying the overall laptop landscape until the evening of Feb 13th, when I just decided to go ahead and get the MacBookBro 15". The following evening found me at the local Apple store.
After describing what options I wanted and conditions I had (like examining the unit for dead pixels at the advice of a friend), I handed over a credit card and in five minutes became an Apple guy.
I had heard of the "out of box" experience with Apple gear and have to say I was very impressed with the minimalist approach.
Out of the box, the computer was already charged and good to go. Not a dead pixel to be found. So I scooped up my new Mac, a neat messenger bag, a copy of VMWare, a mouse (okay, so I am old school) and headed home to start moving in to it.
I'll just jump ahead to my conclusion and spare the gritty details.
In my opinion, this whole Mac or PC thing is bogus.
By adding VMWare, I was able to load a fresh copy of Windows XP underneath it. Again, I won't bore you with details, but I have a number of packages that only run in XP, so I actually needed it.
It was surprisingly fast. In fact, it boots up XP many times faster than my desktop box, shuts down in just a few seconds, and I have yet to experience a single crash or BSOD. Sweet.
Within several days and after a lot of detailed work validating that my original data was all intact, I am officially moved in to the MacBookPro and loving it. It will replace a tired but well-worn Dell desktop nicely.
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