I have been considering the switch to Mac and the new machines have won me over. I am amazed at Apple's ability to innovate and continue to deliver excellent--both esthetically and technically--products. I bought my mini PCG-TR3AP sub-notebook VAIO which has a 12" screen for its 8 hour life on its extended battery. I've ordered my MacBook with an extra battery, so I should be able to match the 8 hours I get today (rated 4 hrs each)--and a cool Mac-only feature is the reserve power in the laptop. This allows the computer to stay alive in sleep mode during a battery-swap. That plus Mac's instant sleep equal a good experience from my point of view. The MacBook will be much bigger since they are only selling the 15" version as of today. But I'm looking forward to using it as an occasional media device. Front Row is the "right way" for a media computer to become useful in my house. The DVI out is also a nice option compared to my Sony's VGA. As far as productivity on is concerned: I do a considerable amount of development work--generally using Putty to my linux boxes--which will be no problem on the Mac. I've also been migrating off of MS-specific tools for some time--I'm using hosted applications where possible (Outlook -> Yahoo Mail). The last mile will be finding replacement for those few apps with no matching Mac equivalent MS Project, MS Money and Visio immediately come to mind, but I'm sure there will be more. I think making these trade-offs for an integrated Unix-based OS is a good one. I plan to migrate most (if not all) of my development work locally to the Mac. Besides performance, I'll be able to development offline and hopefully adopt some of the richer tools (that Cocoa MySQL front-end in the Ruby on Rails video looks slick) built for the Mac GUI. I will post anything interesting I discover on my transition. By the way, that does mean I have for sale one SONY VAIO notebook PC. Post a comment if you are interested in the details...
Saturday, January 14, 2006
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2 comments:
Jonathan,
You're going to love your Mac, if only because of not having to use PuTTY, Cygwin (shudder), et. al. But you'll find other reasons, especially since you're into Rails development. I keep my Windows laptop available in case I ever just gotta have Windows access, but that's becoming more and more rare.
You might want to consider Virtual PC for your PC-only programs. As long as you're not doing 3D graphics, your apps should be reasonably performant, especially on that dual-core. VPC will probably only be a stopgap solution for you, though. It won't be long before some enterprising hacker figures out how to dual-boot Windows on a MacBook. Then you'll be able to install Visio & Co. and get native performance.
Have fun with your new toy!
Thanks--I figured I would run VPC since I don't have many graphics-intense PC apps, but the more I think about it, I don't see any reason that Windows apps can't run in a native mode on the MacBook--like Wine on Linux... OK, a little search revealed the DarWine Project which is trying to do just that. It looks like they've reached a few milestones on Darwin x86, but nobody has tested it on the OS/X x86. I will definitely try it out whem my MacBook comes in.
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