It's time for a Mac

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Finally, I succumbed to the pressure and bought it. After months of procrastination and countless visits to the Apple shop, I managed to make the decision and splash out for a 17" MacBookPro with a non-glossy (antiglare) display.

My first impressions are very positive. The Mac is an amazingly beautiful piece of hardware and the OS is just a joy to work with.

the antiglare display
Having seen both displays in the shop I am absolutely certain I  made the right choice. I've also used it in bright sunshine and put simply it's the best screen I've ever used outdoors without a problem.

the keyboard
The backlit keyboard it's just beautiful. Although my friend vpapanik has opted for a completely blank keyboard, I must say that when the lights go off the glow from below is quite pretty and useful.

the performance
This machine (I bought the 2.66GHz not the 2.93 one) is actually fast! Running my CPU-demanding Maze to produce a really large maze, was 15% faster on a virtual Win2k machine on the Mac, than my massive desktop Windows PC (Core2 DUO 2.13GHz)!!! That was a nice surprise.

the OS
Having UNIX in the back-end skinned with Leopard's pretty pictures makes such a nice environment to work with.

the Software
Not surprisingly the software that comes with the Mac (and I include iWork as well) looks consistent and purposely designed with the user in mind. iPhoto is nice, although I much prefer the more powerful (and much more expensive) Adobe LightRoom for my picture workflow so I haven't used it that much.

overall
All in all, the experience is worth it. I bought the Mac with the view of writing applications for my iPod; at the moment I'm only staring at the surface. But in terms of having a powerful (and not-very-portable) laptop that can host most of my needs I have to say that I have not seen anything that can come close to enclosing such power and beauty in a box than the 17" MacBookPro. I have already started thinking about whether I need my desktop to be honest.

Mac vs PC
Now that's a much discussed subject that probably demands a special blog-post. As a programmer who has written millions of lines for Windows (and MS) operating systems over the years, I feel obliged to mention that I can't jump ship that easily. There's no need for animosity between Mac and PC users. Both are quite nice to work with. There are things that I like on both systems and I believe that they can co-exist with each other.

The only difference between the two is that I can run Windows VMs on my Mac, but I can't run Mac OS X on a VM that runs on windows. And from that point of view Mac "wins" not because of ability but because of licensing policy... :-\ And that's not very nice, is it?


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