The company I work for provides laptops to ensure we've got something decent when we go to our client sites. There's a schedule of replacing older systems, and this year mine came due. A large number of people have been opting for the Macbook Pro, and since I always have ambitions of doing newer stuff, I thought I might be able to get in some iPad or iPhone development, too, so I opted for the Mac this round.

Been working on this for a day or two...I should publish it, or no one else will know about it...

Executive Summary

I'm 90% pleased with the Mac so far. Half of the remaining 10% is going to fade as I get re-used to the keyboard and hot-keys and finish putting my environment together. The rest, like the quirks of any machine, I'll have to suck-up and learn to live with.

It's a solid, fast, responsive machine. Everything I want to work just work works.

Verbose Discussion

To set up some comparisons, my old laptop was a Dell Vostro with a 17-inch monitor and a pretty zippy dual-core processor. I had two weak complaints about the machine: one was the 160GB HDD (which admittedly was a fair laptop size when I first got it), and the other was that it came with Windows Vista (then the current Microsoft offering).

Anyone who knows me knows I'm not a big fan of Microsoft OS's any more. I used to be almost an evangelist, but I feel they lost sight of the goal a while ago. Their software skirts standards, has tremendous bloat, and is rather slow by comparison to many of the alternaties. I've been a long-time user of various free Unix-like OSs, like BSD, Linux, and (until recently) Solaris. I'd put Ubuntu on my Dell about a week into having it, as I couldn't deal with the parts that shouldn't have been slow.

One example I like to share was my initial installation of the usual IDE we use: Eclipse. I'd downloaded the .zip file and set it unpacking. It reported, in typical Windows fashion, a very long time, in the order of double-digit hours. It should have been the case that the countdown would race toward zero, but it hung at a very long time for a very long time. So long, in fact, that I downloaded and installed Cygwin, added the unzip utility, and unzipped the archive from Cygwin's shell before the Windows Zip folder handled that original file (that I'd left running in the background). Adding 7-Zip helped, but didn't make it outstanding, like I had hoped.

I added Ubuntu to the system, dual booting for about a year, eventually (due to the Magic Media Button) reformatting the whole HDD with Ubuntu. I then ran Windows 7 using (now) Oracle's VirtualBox. Windows running inside the virtual machine performed at least as well as it had when running natively; there was a tiny loss in the video performance (with the loss of direct access to the video card, no doubt), mitigated slightly by the 3D acceleration, but it wasn't a big deal as I didn't do anything 3D in Windows; I was using it merely to test websites in IE (and also speak with authority on issues of Windows PC maintenance).

I've digressed...

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