Although minimum expenditure may rule out the MacBook Pro, the price
difference between it and the MacBook has been worth it for me. My
wife has a 2.2 GHz MacBook and I have the 2.2 GHz MacBook Pro, each
with 4 GB of RAM. Some of the differences are measurable: 15.4" vs 13"
screen real estate; also, we both use Skype video quite a bit (when
the 128 Kbit "broadband" internet is working for us), and hers is
struggling to render the video with both cores nearly maxed out while
mine is using about 20% of both cores - I assume the difference is in
the dedicated video card of the MBP. Other differences are more
intangible, such as my preference for the matte screen vs the glossy
screen, feeling of the keyboard.
All that said, though, I still prefer even the MacBook over the
Windows XP Dell 840 that I had at my last job. But then, I won't get
into the whole Mac vs Windows thing :-) For a good "geek box" for
doing software development, I must say that Linux would be really
tempting, at least if it came pre-installed on a box with all the
driver kinks worked out. Actually, I think that "the network is the
computer" has turned out amazingly true, although I believe that when
Sun coined the phrase, they were talking about LAN instead of the web,
which was still in its infancy if even that. Perhaps the pithy phrase
now should be "the browser is the computer." If so, then that's
another reason for going for the reliability of a Linux box, since the
browsers are so similar among platforms (actually, I'm not sure how
the browser plug-in situation is for Linux, thinking for example of
Flash, so maybe Linux browsers are still problematic).
;; Gary
On Dec 22, 2008, at 3:29 PM, Nicholas Frost wrote:
Well, my trusty Dell laptop HD has probebly died giving me an
opportunity
to upgrade to the next best thing. Â The next best thing must still
be a
laptop, runs Apache, MySQL and PHP, GIMP and screams, for minimum
bucks,
for all round office use and web development. Is it a MacOSX, Windows
XP/Vista or Linux? Â Any thoughts to put in my note to Santa would be
greatly appreciated.
"Minimum bucks" might indicate leaning towards the bargain PC or PC
laptop. However, at $999 the closeout white Macbooks are (IMHO)
quite nice
machines. With $80 for VMWare Fusion you can run multiple OS's
(Windows,
Linux x64, etc.). Alternatively with rEFIt you could have multiple
OS's
natively (Solaris even) through a boot menu. Having used a white
Macbook
that runs OS X and Windows XP SP2, Ubuntu 7.x (32-bit), Ubuntu x64 (v.
8.04) since February 2008 I prefer the Macbook to any of the laptops
I've
used recently (Dell D820, Thinkpad, etc.). There is also the
VirtualBox
option for a hypervisor and multiple OS's.
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