Guess I have to chime in as well. Macs are wonderful machines
to work on, love the feel of the powerbook keyboards. The underlying
OS is basically Unix so I feel at home with the terminal and Emacs.
I'd still be using a Mac laptop at home, but my wife's PC died and
she stole my powerbook and won't give it back. Even after I fixed
up her PC. :-(
However, the cost issues keep me from buying another one, the
XP machine I've got for games at home is good enough for offsite
work and I don't travel enough to justify having one for work.
Ah well, one of these days.
Anyhow, my major gripe with the Mac OS is that they've significantly
changed the sysadmin of the system. Usernames/passwords aren't stored
in /etc/passwd, fewer and fewer of the config file reside in /etc any
more. Heck, they've stopped updating a lot of the old /etc files to
sync them with their other system of storing config options.
So as long as you're not trying to admin a Mac OS server, they're
wonderful.
Rene
Richard Lawrence wrote:
I'll throw my two cents in here, as another person who uses both a Mac
and Debian/Ubuntu.
I bought a MacBook back in April, when my old Toshiba gasped its final
breath while I was in the middle of writing my senior thesis. I was
somewhat hesitant to buy an Apple because of the price, but after
looking around (admittedly briefly, since I needed a computer
immediately), I found that the price was actually reasonable,
considering the hardware specs. Machines with similar processors,
RAM, and hard drive sizes from Dell, HP, or IBM all cost the same
amount or more when I looked -- and weren't nearly as pretty. Yes,
you can get a cheaper PC, but only if you're willing to sacrifice some
of the hardware. Add to that the fact that OS X is way more stable
and usable than any Windows OS I've ever used, as well as the fact
that it came with a fully-functional command line and all my favorite
Unix tools, and I started to see the MacBook as a great value.
