Just my experience, FWIW. I owned four 12" Powerbooks... loved em. Always had good desktops at the office and home, never felt cramped. I used to travel more too - for a while I was commuting cross-country ever other week, and frequently took two machines - my PowerBook and my corporate Dell laptop (also a small one, I believe 12").
I upgraded, grudgingly at first, to a Macbook when they came out - the performance of the 12" by that point had just become unbearable, and the Macbook was like greased lightning. I thought I'd be annoyed with the size - even though the Macbook was still somewhat small - and in fact took it on a long, mostly foot-bound trip through Italy just a few weeks after getting it. The weight and size never bothered me, but I figured that'd be as big as I could go comfortably. Then my house got burglarized and lost several machines including the Macbook. At the same time I went to work for Blizzard, and I needed a new gaming PC. I was torn between getting a Macbook + a shitty gaming PC for the kicks.... errr, research... but then stumbled on a sweet deal on a 17" Macbook Pro. Fully loaded, top end CPU, GPU, 7200rpm drive. Could handle WoW brilliantly - though what can't? - but also played Crysis and other heavy games just fine. Yeah, it's big. I never thought I'd get a 17", seemed absurd to me... but in the end, I don't even notice. I bike with it... I take it everywhere... sure, it's a beast, but it's the first time a portable hasn't felt restrictive to me. It's really an uncompromising machine - the screen is just ridiculous, it performs like a desktop, but is still (just barely, but barely enough) portable. If I did much air travel these days I'm sure I'd feel differently... but right now, I love this form factor. I've considered getting a cheap little netbook as an alternative for those rare moments I want to take something more than an iPhone, but less than my 17"... Note - I do a mix of work... I regularly work with massive image files, so even the 4GB I have stuffed in it isn't nearly enough, but it's the best I could get at the time. I do a good bit of writing, reports, presentations, and a healthy mix of Web and desktop scripting. The huge display is a godsend - I could never work in FlexBuilder on a lower-rez display - feels much closer to my home/work experience with multiple monitors on each machine. Again, just FWIW. _______________________________________________ OSX-Nutters mailing list | [email protected] http://lists.tit-wank.com/mailman/listinfo/osx-nutters List hosted at http://cat5.org/
