considering a new laptop

[imotic]

I just sold my old toshiba tablet for chump change, and it's time to get a new laptop. Now that I'm graduating, I don't need a tablet anymore, and I'm looking to get something that is large enough to program on but small/light enough to bike around with.

I'm pretty sure I found the perfect bag to commute with, the keen newport pack. It has a

Comments

[ilp]

I haven't played with any of the laptops you are considering, but see if you can go use them to see if you like the feel. MBP has a really nice touchpad. Large, direct-feeling. A bunch of the touchpads for some regular laptops I played with in the store just feel weird, the finger drags all slow. I guess once you get used to a nice touchpad, it's hard to go back.

I've compared build quality of $400-500 range laptops and Apple's is definitely superior. Again, I haven't looked at the ones you're using.

The Mac OS is nice for me for the daily "typical computer user" reasons. When I switched, nothing matched Time Machine for backups. Plug in your drive and it does the right thing, no thought attached. I swear, I searched for a Windows equivalent (back in 2008) and could not make anything work like it. I even bought SyncBackSE.

Window switching via Expose is really nice. I never use Alt-Tab. Built-in Spaces works well. I do like having the terminal and bash scripting available, and having the system run on top of Unix was a selling point, but I rarely use it, to be honest.

I like the default iPhoto app--it does most everything I want for photo post-processing. Key features like shadow and highlight adjustment are built in! In the iPhoto, I like the way they thought about the events feature: my camera's photos are auto-split based on dates. That works really well, causing me to almost never sort photos.. I just name the auto-created sets. For multi-day trips, drag'n'drop 'em together. That's the kind of thinking that permeates the apps that come with the computer and I appreciate that. I can spend more time doing stuff and less time thinking about how to do it.

Windows 7's dock is basically an acknowledgement of what Apple's been trying to do: think less about opening and closing apps and more about just going to an app. I like that.

I haven't used iMovie more than a few minutes yet, but it makes it easy to work with video. Haven't used Windows MovieMaker, so can't compare.

Sure, maybe Picasa for Windows is now really good, but I haven't used it, so I can't comment. I remember not being all that impressed.

I found Safari to work great for browsing and never switched to Firefox. FF3 at the time seemed to run weird/awkward. I may try Chrome soon, just haven't thought about it enough to do it.

I like that it's not a target for malware (yet). I like that there's no registry.

Two-finger scrolling feels direct in the browser and every app (except for Firefox.. maybe they fixed that recently). It's quite amazing, but basically it's smooth and direct, so you feel that the moment you lift your fingers, it stops exactly where you want it to.

So, off the shelf, my MBP was very useful for many daily tasks (not development, but things like pictures and the web). And I feel that Apple's focus is to continue to make any Mac be the best personal computer you can buy, whereas Microsoft still seems to be focused on building a platform and not the whole experience. So I guess, I am just a sucker for that well-put-together experience.

Apple Hardware == teh good

[runexe]

I'd definitely back up everything Oleg said: the quality of the build on the Macbook and Macbook Pro is worth the price - and in general anything from HP/Dell/etc. that matches the quality costs the same or more.

I've completely converted over to OS X for my 'daily'/home use. I'm still running Ubuntu for my main work machine, and I use Windows occasionally as well (I'll be trying out 7 next week in fact).

Time machine is a life saver - it does everything a backup program should do, and you don't have to think about it (besides hooking up/turning on the external hard drive, or network storage if you're into that).

Point is - my MBP is now three years old, and I won't be replacing it anytime soon. Genn is still running her nearly 5 year old MB, and besides a HD and memory upgrade she hasn't needed anything else. When you get to the end of the story, Apple doesn't really cost more, it just feels that way if you're comparing it to bargain basement prices.